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Persistence … and Prayer: From the Artificial Kidney to the AutoAnalyzer

2000; American Association for Clinical Chemistry; Volume: 46; Issue: 9 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/clinchem/46.9.1425

1530-8561

Leonard T. Skeggs,

Metabolism and Genetic Disorders

I am a relic of the last century, born in 1918, the last year of the first World War.At that time, there was no radio, no television, no commercial air travel.There was no welfare, no social security, no Medicare, and only the rich paid income taxes.Influenza, strep throat, pneumonia, tuberculosis, polio, and high blood pressure were deadly diseases.I was 11 when the stock market crashed and the Great Depression began.Unemployment reached 25%.The most precious thing a person could have was a job.In 1940, I entered graduate school studying biochemistry at what is now Case Western Reserve University.Victor Myers was head of the department.He was near the end of his career and was prone to talk about his old friends Otto Folin and Stanley Benedict and others and their struggle to learn how to analyze blood.They were the first clinical chemists.They had no pH meter, no spectrophotometer.Optical densities were estimated by visual comparison of standard and unknown.They had to calibrate their own pipettes.It could not have been easy.When I entered the department, most everyone used DuBosc visual colorimeters.We had one Evelyn photoelectric colorimeter with glass filters and one newly invented Beckman pH meter.There was no good way to determine the quantitative amino acid composition of proteins.No one understood what the purine and pyrimidine bases and nucleic acids were good for.The Journal of Biochemistry published one modest volume a year.I do not think any of us understood that we were caught up in a wave of scientific and technological progress that would grow and gather speed at an exponential rate.I am glad to have lived during this period and to have been a very, very small part of it all.By 1941, I had my Master's degree and was working for my PhD.My sweetheart, Jean Hossel, was in her third year of nursing training at nearby St. Luke's Hospital.We planned to get married the next year.Then suddenly, without warning, the Japanese struck at Pearl Harbor.It was on a Sunday in the early afternoon.I was in the Rat Room at the Cleveland Clinic doing vaginal smears on rats.That evening, while sitting in my 1936 Ford V8 coupe outside of St. Luke's Hospital, Jean and I decided to marry without delay.We were married 5 days later, as soon as the license permitted, and Jean moved into my rented room with me because the rent had been paid.Not long after that we were both at Ben Venue Laboratories, which had a contract to lyophilize blood plasma for the army.Jean was in charge of a group of nurses who made up pools of plasma and distributed them in transfusion bottles.The bottles were shell-frozen.I was given the responsibility of drying them from the frozen state.This was a new and little-known process.It was a very difficult time and a heavy responsibility until we finally learned the process.By the spring of 1943, drying plasma had become a routine process.I persuaded my draft board to reclassify me from 2b to 1a and enlisted in the Navy.I was given orders to report to Officers' Training School at Cornell in August.In the intervening 3 months, I worked at the SMA Corporation on the purification of penicillin from culture medium, which consisted of corn steep liquor; a thick dark brown gooey liquid.All I remember now is that we extracted the penicillin into amyl acetate and back into water.I remember very clearly Dr. Paul Gyory storming into our laboratory one Saturday morning demanding penicillin.I gave him the dark brown solution I had just made.He took it to the hospital, gave it to his patient, and saved his life.This was a thrilling moment for me that I will never forget.The discovery of penicillin was perhaps the greatest discovery of the 20th century.After Officers' Training, I was ordered to the USS Hovey, DMS11, a World War I destroyer converted to minesweeper duty.