The Egg & He

The name of Ernest W. Goodpasture is known to few Americans outside the medical profession. But in medicine he is known as one of the greatest pathologists in the U.S. Thirty years in the research laboratory have made him a living legend.

One scientific writer asserts that Goodpasture's development of viruses in chick embryo--which opened the way for large-scale production of vaccines against fowlpox, smallpox, yellow fever, influenza and typhus fever--is "comparable to ... Louis Pasteur's proof of the germ theory." Another has said that he "richly deserved" a Nobel prize. Last week Dr. Goodpasture, pathologist of Nashville's Vanderbilt University, got a prize--the 1946 Passano Foundation* award ($5,000 cash) for the advancement of medical research.

The Chick & the Egg. What Ernest Goodpasture has done is to devise a means of propagating large quantities of pure virus--the poison (uncontaminated by bacteria) which produces disease. Scientists had never been able to get enough pure virus for their experiments because viruses, unlike bacteria, demand live tissue; they will not multiply in artificial culture media.

The clue to Goodpasture's revolutionary discovery came from research on a common barnyard disease, fowlpox, which farmers know as "sore head." With an associate, Dr. Alice Miles Woodruff, he hit on the idea of cultivating fowlpox virus in a fertile egg. It was cheaper than the rats, guinea pigs and monkeys which scientists had used previously; it was a sterile medium enclosed in a naturally sterile container. After purchasing an incubator from a mail-order house and a few dozen fertile eggs from a Nashville hatchery, Dr. Goodpasture set to work.

With a dentist's drill, he cut out a piece of the shell, inoculated the thin membrane inside with infectious material, sat back to study the results through a tiny "window" of melted paraffin and cover glass. The fowlpox virus throve. Subsequent tests with smallpox vaccine showed that one egg would produce enough to protect 1,000 children for life. Word of the new technique spread throughout the scientific world.

Wanted: Freedom. Last week, as he stepped up to receive the Passano award in Baltimore's historic Osler Hall of Maryland Medical and Chirurgical Faculty, Ernest Goodpasture saw an opportunity to expound some theories about research developed in the years on the "Endless Frontier." In a philosophic, rambling and often brilliant address, he deplored the fact that researchers are too often hamstrung by special "projects," are not permitted to follow their own keen noses. Exploratory research, said he, entails relatively great financial risk, but these risks must be met if medicine is to serve humanity and not a social order. His conclusion :

"Let each social order . . . give the scientist a free hand and provide him with the environment and tools he needs; make him accessible to students, for he is essentially a teacher, make the university his home, and otherwise, for humanity's sake, leave him alone."

* Created in 1944 by the Baltimore medical publishing firm of Williams & Wilkins.

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