Colin Munro MacLeod was a Canadian-American medical scientist.
Background
Colin Munro MacLeod was born on January 28, 1909, in Port Hastings, Nova Scotia, Canada. He was the son of John Charles MacLeod and Lillian Munro.
His father was a Scottish Presbyterian minister and his mother a schoolteacher.
Education
An outstanding student, MacLeod skipped three full grades to graduate from secondary school at St. Francis College in Richmond, Quebec, at the age of fifteen. As a result, he had to defer his entry into McGill College for one year, during which he taught sixth grade in a Richmond school. After two years of premedical preparation, he entered McGill University Medical School, which awarded him the M. D. degree in 1932.
MacLeod completed his medical training with two years on the house staff of the Montreal General Hospital and then received an appointment at the hospital of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in New York City. This move initiated an extraordinary career in medical science that produced notable contributions in basic and clinical research, education, administration, and science policy at the governmental level.
Career
On arriving at the Rockefeller Institute in 1934, MacLeod joined the laboratory of Dr. O. T. Avery, who for the past twenty years had been studying the pneumococcus, the most common cause of bacterial pneumonia. One of the areas of interest in Avery's laboratory at that time was a phenomenon known as the transformation of pneumococcal types, which had been discovered by an English bacteriologist, Fred Griffith, in 1928.
MacLeod elected to direct his major research effort to this problem. Initially, work on the phenomenon had been motivated by its possible relation to the virulence of the pneumococcus, but it became clear that it had broader implications and represented something akin to the transfer of genetic information between two different pneumococci. Thus, the research focused on the nature of the substance found in extracts of pneumococci that was transferring the information.
MacLeod made significant progress in many aspects of the problem, but the ultimate goal proved elusive. Not until 1944 was he able to report, in a paper written with Avery and Maclyn McCarty that the transforming substance was DNA. In effect, his first research project had led to the landmark discovery that genes are made of DNA.
Although he continued his association with this research until it was published, MacLeod's full-time participation in the laboratory work ended in 1941, when he moved to New York University School of Medicine as chairman of the Department of Microbiology. Here he initiated his role as an educator by building an academic department of medical microbiology that was characterized by excellence and versatility and became a model for preclinical science departments.
At the same time, he continued his research, both on other aspects of pneumococcal transformation and on new ventures. MacLeod's activity as a government science adviser began at New York University when he was a consultant in military medicine. In 1946, he became president of the Army Epidemiological Board and served for several years in this capacity. Later, during the administration of Mayor Robert F. Wagner, he was a leader in the group that organized the Health Research Council in 1959, a notable experiment in the support of medical and health research by a municipal government.
As its first chairman(1960 - 1970), MacLeod guided the council through its formative period. It was a successful enterprise that was a victim of the city's fiscal crisis in the mid-1970's. MacLeod left New York City in 1956 to become the John Herr Musser Professor of Research Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. There he continued the pattern of participating broadly in the functions of the medical school while pursuing his advisory and consulting activities.
Four years later, he returned to New York University as a professor of medicine with the specific purpose of developing a division of genetics. When this initiative was beginning to thrive in 1963, he accepted his first full-time position in government as deputy director of the Office of Science and Technology in the White House. He was primarily responsible for the biological sciences, and his interests in the national and international promotion of science deepened.
On leaving Washington, D. C. , in 1966, MacLeod became vice-president for medical affairs of the Commonwealth Fund in New York, directing its programs for the study of medical education and delivery of medical care. This activity proved to be less rewarding than he had expected, and he found a new challenge in 1970, as president of the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation, an organization that had not yet achieved its full potential.
During the remaining year and a half of his life, he worked to improve this institution's position in medical research. At the same time, he continued his interest in international medical problems.
MacLeod died January 28, 1909, in London while en route to Bangladesh on a mission concerning cholera for the U. S. Public Health Service.
Achievements
Personality
MacLeod became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1941. MacLeod had tremendous energy that made it possible for him to engage in several different activities at the same time. The productivity of the boards and committees that he chaired depended in great part on his skill in winning the cooperation of his colleagues.
He was widely respected and admired for his abilities as both scientist and administrator, and acquired a wide circle of friends throughout the world.
Connections
MacLeod married Elizabeth Randol on July 2, 1938; they had one child.