Partner Alphonse Dochez
Queer Places:
2370 Moran St, Halifax, NS B3K 4K2, Canada
Columbia University (Ivy League), 116th St and Broadway, New York, NY 10027
Mount Olivet Cemetery
Nashville, Davidson County, Tennessee, US
Oswald Theodore Avery Jr. (October 21, 1877 – February 20, 1955) was
a Canadian-American physician and medical researcher. With
Alphonse Dochez, he
discovered the soluble substance that confers type-specificity upon
pneumococci. Their work demonstrated that the substance was of capsular origin
and present in both blood and urine of infected patients. The two, who often
collaborated, also revealed the importance of type-specific antibodies in
recovery from pneumococcal pneumonia. This discovery lead to the production of
the first effective pneumococcal pneumonia therapy. The therapy, using
type-specific anti-pneumococcal horse serum, was used until the development of
sulfonamides and
penicillin.[1] Avery and Dochez shared an apartment for decades.
The major part of Avery's career was spent at the
Rockefeller University 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 (published in 1944 with his co-workers
Colin MacLeod and
Maclyn McCarty) that isolated
DNA as the
material of which
genes and
chromosomes are made.[4][5][6]
The
Nobel laureate
Arne Tiselius said that Avery was the most deserving scientist not to
receive the Nobel Prize for his work,[7]
though he was nominated for the award throughout the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s.[8][9]
The
lunar crater
Avery was named in his honor.
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. As a youth, Avery studied music at first and then switched
to medicine at college, earning his medical degree and beginning a practice in
1904.[11]
For many years, genetic information was thought to be contained in
cell
protein. Continuing the research done by
Frederick Griffith in 1927, Avery worked with MacLeod and 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 the disease. Then the remnants of the R strain
bacteria were treated with a
deoxyribonuclease enzyme which removed the DNA. After this treatment, the
R strain bacteria no longer transformed. This indicated that DNA was the
carrier of genes in cells.[12]
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."[13]
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".
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.[14]
My published books:
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oswald_Avery