Oswald Avery

Avery was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia in 1877 to Francis Joseph Avery, a Baptist minister, and his wife Elizabeth Crowdy. The couple had immigrated 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.[10] When Avery was 10, his family moved to the Lower East Side of New York City. Avery earned his undergraduate degree at Colgate University and was a member of the Class of 1900.[11] Avery studied music at first and then switched to medicine at college, earning his medical degree and beginning a practice in 1904.[12]

In 1912, Rufus Cole, who had noticed some of Avery's publications, offered him a position at the recently opened Rockefeller Hospital, a facility for clinical research and part of the Rockefeller Institute. Avery accepted. 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.[13]

At the height of the 1918 influenza epidemic, the dominant hypothesis was that the causative agent in the disease was a bacterium — specifically, Haemophilus influenzae (then called 'Pfeiffer's bacillus' or Bacillus influenzae), a microbe first isolated by German bacteriologist Richard Pfeiffer, which he had identified in nasal samples of patients infected by seasonal influenza decades earlier and which was also found in many but not all samples taken from patients in the 1918 epidemic.[14] The failure to isolate B. influenzae in some patients was generally attributed to the difficulty of culturing the bacterium.[14]

Peter Olitsky and Frederick Gates at the Rockefeller Institute found that nasal secretions from infected patients could still cause disease in the lungs of rabbits after having been filtered through a bacterium-excluding Berkefeld filter, but other researchers were unable to reproduce their results. Avery initially doubted Olitsky's and Gates's data, and set out to prove the B. influenzae hypothesis. For that purpose, he developed improved culture media for B. influenzae, which were widely adopted and reduced the possibility of false negatives.[14] However, B. influenzae could still not be found in all influenza patients. The true cause of influenza, a virus, would not be discovered until the 1930s.

After the influenza epidemic, Avery returned to his work on pneumococcus. He identified R and S strains of the bacterium; the latter caused disease and had a polysaccharide capsule, while the former lacked the capsule and was harmless. Griffith's experiment of 1928 showed that the ability to produce a capsule could be transferred from S to R strain bacteria, even if the S strain bacteria were killed first.

For many years, genetic information was thought to be contained in cell protein. Continuing the research done by Frederick Griffith, Avery worked with Colin MacLeod and Maclyn McCarty on the mystery of inheritance. He had received emeritus status from the Rockefeller Institute in 1943, but continued working for five years, though by that time he was in his late sixties. Techniques were available to remove various organic compounds from bacteria, and if the remaining organic compounds were still able to cause R strain bacteria to transform then the substances removed could not be the carrier of genes. S-bacteria first had the large cellular structures removed. Then they were treated with protease enzymes, which removed the proteins from the cells before the remainder was placed with R strain bacteria. The R strain bacteria transformed, meaning that proteins did not carry the genes causing disease. Then the remnants of the S strain bacteria were treated with a deoxyribonuclease enzyme which removed the DNA. After this treatment, the R strain bacteria no longer transformed. This showed that DNA was the substance that transformed R strain into S strain bacteria and indicated that it was the carrier of genes in cells.[15]

Alfred Hershey and Martha Chase furthered Avery's research in 1952 with the Hershey–Chase experiment. These experiments paved the way for Watson and Crick's discovery of the helical structure of DNA, and thus the birth of modern genetics and molecular biology. Of this event, Avery wrote in a letter to his youngest brother Roy, a bacteriologist at the Vanderbilt School of Medicine: "It's lots of fun to blow bubbles but it's wiser to prick them yourself before someone else tries to."[16]

Nobel laureate Joshua Lederberg stated that Avery and his laboratory provided "the historical platform of modern DNA research" and "betokened the molecular revolution in genetics and biomedical science generally". Avery is best known for his 1944 discovery that DNA is the material of which genes and chromosomes are made.

The collected papers of Avery are stored at the Tennessee State Library and Archives and at the Rockefeller Archive. Many of his papers, poems, and hand written lab-notes are available at the National Library of Medicine in the Oswald T. Avery Collection, the first of their Profiles in Science series.[17]

• Diamond, Arthur M. (1982). "Avery's 'Neurotic Reluctance'". Perspectives in Biology and Medicine. 26 (1): 132–136. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.587.6127. doi:10.1353/pbm.1982.0002. PMID 6765132. S2CID 45856676.
• René Dubos, The Professor, the Institute, and DNA: Oswald T. Avery, His Life and Scientific Achievements, 1976, Paul & Company, ISBN 0-87470-022-1
• Lehrer, Steven (2006). Explorers of the Body (2nd ed.). United States: iUniverse, Inc. ISBN 0-595-40731-5.
• Sri Kantha, S (1989). "Avery's non-recognition in Nobel awards". BioEssays. 10 (4): 131. doi:10.1002/bies.950100411. PMID 2730635. S2CID 221464173.
• Avery, O T; Macleod C M; McCarty M (October 2000). "Studies on the chemical nature of the substance inducing transformation of pneumococcal types: Induction of transformation by a desoxyribonucleic acid fraction isolated from Pneumococcus type III. Oswald Theodore Avery (1877–1955)". Clin. Orthop. Relat. Res. 379 (379 Suppl): S3–8. doi:10.1097/00003086-200010001-00002. PMC 2229990. PMID 11039746.
• Austrian, R (July 1999). "Oswald T. Avery: the Wizard of York Avenue". Am. J. Med. 107 (1A): 7S–11S. doi:10.1016/S0002-9343(99)00109-6. PMID 10451004.
• Lederberg, J (February 1994). "The transformation of genetics by DNA: an anniversary celebration of Avery, MacLeod and McCarty (1944)". Genetics. 136 (2): 423–6. PMC 1205797. PMID 8150273.
• Amsterdamska, O (1993). "From pneumonia to DNA: the research career of Oswald T. Avery". Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences : HSPS / Office of History of Science and Technology, University of California, Berkeley. 24 (pt 1): 1–40. doi:10.2307/27757711. JSTOR 27757711. PMID 11623400.
• Russell, N (December 1988). "Oswald Avery and the origin of molecular biology". The British Journal for the History of Science. 21 (71 Pt 4): 193–400. doi:10.1017/S0007087400025310. PMID 11621687.
• Pirie, N W (December 1972). "Avery in retrospect". Nature. 240 (5383): 572. doi:10.1038/240572a0. PMID 4568407. S2CID 30778901.
• Coburn, A F (1969). "Oswald Theodore Avery and DNA". Perspect. Biol. Med. 12 (4): 623–30. doi:10.1353/pbm.1969.0002. PMID 4900165. S2CID 39988917.
• Kay, Alan (1970). "Avery, Oswald T.". Dictionary of Scientific Biography. 1. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. pp. 342–343. ISBN 0-684-10114-9.
• Key Participants: Oswald T. Avery - Linus Pauling and the Race for DNA: A Documentary History
• Oswald Avery Papers finding aid at the Tennessee State Library and Archives
• Oswald T. Avery Collection (1912-2005) - National Library of Medicine finding aid
• The Oswald T. Avery Collection - Profiles in Science, National Library of Medicine
• National Academy of Sciences Biographical Memoir