Oswald Avery
Oswald Theodore Avery Jr. was a Canadian-American physician and medical researcher. The major part of his career was spent at the Rockefeller Hospital in New York City. Avery was one of the first molecular biologists and a pioneer in immunochemistry, but he is best known for the experiment that isolated DNA as the material of which genes and chromosomes are made.
The Nobel laureate Arne Tiselius said that Avery was the most deserving scientist not to receive the Nobel Prize for his work, though he was nominated for the award throughout the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s.
The lunar crater Avery was named in his honor.
Family
Oswald Avery's grandfather was Joseph Henry Avery.' He was a papermaker, and he was in charge of the papermaking at Oxford University. He discovered a way to make thin paper that could be printed on both sides. This paper was used to make Oxford Bibles.Avery's father, Joseph Francis Avery, born in 1846 in Norwich, Norfolk, became a Baptist minister after coming under the influence of C. H. Spurgeon, a Baptist Evangelist. He married his wife, Elizabeth Crowdy, in 1870, and spent three years in England, where he would continue his pastoral service as a Baptist. After this, he would move to Halifax, Nova Scotia with his wife, against the wishes of his friends, believing it to be the Will of God. He remained as a pastor for 14 years in Halifax before traveling to the Mariner's Temple in New York City, where he would preach to a rowdy and poverty-stricken crowd.' While here, he would publish an edifying pamphlet entitled "The Voyage of Life", edited the church publication Buds and Blossoms, and patented and attempted to sell a preparation known as "Avery's Auraline", though it would gain little success. When their home burned to the ground in December 1890, the Baptist community of New York banded together to help pay for the expenses, including one John D. Rockefeller. He would die in 1892, leaving his wife Elizabeth Avery a widow.
Avery's mother, Elizabeth Crowdy, was the beating heart and soul that made her husband's church the community center it was. After Joseph Francis Avery's death, she would continue editing the publication Buds and Blossoms. She would also continue to work with the Baptist City Mission Society, where she would come into association with a number of wealthy people, including the Sloans, the Vanderbilts, and the Rockefellers.
Oswald had two siblings - an older brother Ernest and a younger brother Roy. Ernest was a gifted child, but became ill at a young age. Roy followed his brother Oswald in the field of bacteriology. He eventually taught at Vanderbilt Medical School in Nashville, Tennessee.
Early life and education
Oswald Avery was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1877 to Francis Joseph Avery, a Baptist minister, and his wife Elizabeth Crowdy. The couple had emigrated from Britain in 1873. Oswald Avery was born and grew up in a small wooden row house on Moran Street in the North End of Halifax, now a designated heritage building. When Avery was 10, his family moved to the Lower East Side of New York City. Oswald Avery began participating in church activities at a young age. He and his older brother Ernest learned how to play the cornet from a German musician who played at church. Soon, both were playing at church themselves. The brothers played on the steps of Mariners' Temple to attract worshippers.' Both earned a scholarship to the National Conservatory of Music. Ernest became sick and did not continue, but Oswald pushed onward. He became talented enough to play with the National Academy of Music in Antonin Dvorak's Symphony No. 5, From the New World, under direction of Walter Damrosch.'Oswald Avery began at Colgate University in 1896. Even though Colgate was a Baptist school, there were signs of rebellion against orthodoxy during Avery's time at the university. In Avery's senior year, he and a few of his classmates asked their philosophy professor to create a metaphysics class that would allow them to explore the credibility of the Christian faith.' Avery's senior year was entirely electives, but he did not choose to take a single science elective, even though many were offered.' Avery made exceptional grades throughout his years at Colgate. He received 8.5 out of 10 or above in all courses his freshman year and 9 out of 10 or above his sophomore through senior year. Avery's top grades were in his public speaking courses, in which he never received lower than a 9.5. He even tied for first with his friend Emerson in an oratorical contest. Avery earned his undergraduate degree in humanities at Colgate University and was a member of the Class of 1900.
Oswald Avery began medical studies at The College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University in New York later in the year of 1900. At the college, he made good grades in all of his courses, except bacteriology and pathology. He graduated with a medical degree in 1904, and then he began to practice general medicine. Avery did not like dealing with patients who had chronic diseases that he was unable to fix. He practiced medicine until 1907 when he began working as an associate director to Benjamin White in Hoagland Laboratory.
Hoagland Laboratory
At Hoagland Laboratory, he began by studying the bacteriology of yogurt and other fermented milk products and their effects on gut bacteria. He recorded his findings in "Observations on Certain Lactic Acid Bacteria of the Bulgaricus Type". During the years 1909 through 1913, he performed medical research with bacteriological, immunological, and chemical approaches.For a period of time, White came down with tuberculosis. Avery went with him to Trudea Sanatorium for a cure. Afterwards, Avery went back to take vacations at the sanatorium. He became interested in tuberculosis and began doing research in the Trudea Laboratory, where he looked at the clinical and experimental aspects of tuberculosis. Here he carried out 100 consecutive blood cultures of tuberculosis patients in the active phase of the disease. He never found evidence of secondary infection. His careful clinical investigation caught the eye of Dr. Rufus Cole at Rockefeller Institute.
At Hoagland, Avery performed a chemical and toxicological study of a product derived from tubercle bacilli. With White as a colleague, he extracted the product with alkaline ethanol. The research was published in 1912. This further showed his systematic effort to observe and analyze bacterial activity using their chemical structure. In 1911, Avery instructed staff of H. K. Mulford Company in bacteriological techniques, and they taught him the industrial methods for production of antitoxins and vaccines.
Throughout his time at Hoagland, Avery published nine papers, one of which was a chapter on "Opsonins and Vaccine Therapy". He collaborated with Dr. N. B. Potter for this chapter, which was put in Hare's Modern Treatment - a popular medical magazine at the time. Avery also taught a course to student nurses at Hoagland. During the course, he conveyed the dangers of pathogens spread through sneezing. During his teaching, he was given the nicknames "The Professor" and "Fess". While working at Hoagland, Avery was mailed two written offers from Rockefeller Institute, and he denied them both. Avery did not accept the offer until Rufus Cole from Rockefeller came to offer the position to him in person.
Rockefeller Institute
Oswald Avery entered Rockefeller Institute as Assistant in 1913, and in 1915, he became an Associate. In 1919, Avery was promoted to an associate member. He was granted full membership in 1923. At the institute, Cole, Avery and Alphonse Dochez developed the first effective immune serum against a strain of pneumococcus, a bacterium causing pneumonia. The serum was produced from the blood of infected horses.Research showed that various pneumonia cultures isolated from different patients had different immunological properties. This made it difficult to develop a serum effective against all of the different strains. Four main groups of pneumococcus had been discovered - type I, type II, type III, and type IV. Avery investigated distribution of different pneumococcus types in healthy individuals versus individuals with symptoms of pneumonia. Avery found different subgroups of type II pneumococcus. These groups were similar to the type strain in certain aspects. However, the subgroups of type II had similarities amongst each other that they did not share with the other main groups of pneumococcus. Avery wrote about the results of his findings in a 1915 paper called "Varieties of Pneumococcus and Their Relation to Lobar Pneumonia". In the paper, he argued that people who appeared to be healthy could be carriers of pneumonia Avery also suggested it was important to identify the type of strain, based on agglutination of the pneumococci, when determining the appropriate serum for the patient. Avery suggested pneumococci strains that produced more severe symptoms had higher virulence than strains that cause less severe symptoms. A serum effective against type II pneumonia was developed. Avery tested the serum in horses. He processed the serum and measured its antipneumococcal activity. Avery concentrated the serum so that a minimal amount of foreign protein was needed in it. Avery wrote the monograph, Acute Lobar Pneumonia: Prevention and Serum Treatment, that was published by The Institute explaining this improvement.
Avery also helped Dochez in his research on specific soluble substances found in the blood and urine of pneumonia patients. The presence of specific soluble substances in a urine sample allowed him to rapidly test the type of pneumonia without having to wait for a culture to grow. Avery and Heidelberger realized that the capsules of different strains of pneumonia had different polysaccharide structures and concluded that polysaccharides play a role in immunological specificity. Their work with specific soluble substances showed that it is important to consider the factor in the chemical composition of organisms to design anti-serums. Avery published papers on specific soluble substance findings between 1923 and 1929, along with an additional paper he published with Goebel in 1933. He worked with Goebel until 1934, and then Gobel continued their work upon his cessation. Later, Avery concluded that a protein determines the specificity of Diplococcus pneumoniae after he observed that the active protein was the same for all pneumococcal strains but different than that of other bacteria.
Avery became an emeritus member of The Institute when he retired in 1943. However, he continued to work in the lab until 1948.