Background
Rolla Eugene Dyer was born on November 4, 1886, in Delaware County, Ohio. He was the son of the Reverend Rolla Dyer and Nettie Ryant.
epidemiologist pathologist scientist
Rolla Eugene Dyer was born on November 4, 1886, in Delaware County, Ohio. He was the son of the Reverend Rolla Dyer and Nettie Ryant.
In 1903, Dyer entered Kenyon College, which awarded him the B. A. in 1907. From 1908 to 1909 he took courses at Cumberland College in Lebanon, Tennessee.
He enrolled in 1911 at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, where he received his M. D. in 1915.
From 1907 until 1911 Dyer taught ancient and modern languages at various secondary schools.
When he returned later that year to Marlin, Texas, where his parents then lived, they helped to set him up in medical practice there with Dr. Walter H. Allen. This partnership had just begun when Allen had to accompany a patient to the Mayo Clinic, leaving Dyer in charge. The first patient he saw was a farmer who reported that Allen had treated him recently with intravenous quinine and that he needed a second dose. Dyer did not know the man was allergic to quinine. The dose sent the patient into respiratory failure that would have proved fatal if Dyer had not reacted quickly. Allen, upon returning from Minnesota, just shrugged off the incident: "Oh, I forgot to tell you about that. He pretty near died on me too. "
Nevertheless, Dyer remained distraught at having nearly killed his first patient. The stress caused him to lose eighteen pounds in just a few weeks. When his wife suggested that he had neither aptitude nor taste for the practice of medicine, he agreed, and asked Dr. Wilbur Carter, his former dean at Galveston, for advice. Carter suggested that he try the U. S. Public Health Service. The USPHS immediately sent him to New Orleans in October 1916 to help contain the bubonic plague that had broken out there in 1914. His duties mostly involved quarantine enforcement rather than research. A flurry of transfers ensued in the next few years. He investigated pellagra in Spartanburg, South Carolina, from February to September 1917, then influenza in eastern Massachusetts until November 1918.
After June 1919, his attention was directed primarily toward epidemiology. He did field work in Arkansas from August 1919 to June 1920, fought bubonic plague in Galveston and Beaumont, Texas, from August 1920 to June 1921, and served as an epidemiological aid to the New Jersey State Board of Health for a few months in 1921 until he was reassigned in June to the U. S. Hygienic Laboratory (now the National Institutes of Health, or NIH) in Washington, D. C. He became assistant director of the Hygienic Laboratory in August 1922 and held this post until 1942.
Dyer's first six papers, published between 1925 and 1929, all dealt with scarlet fever. His research in the 1920's led to the development of new skin tests and antitoxins for that disease. During this period he also determined that Rocky Mountain spotted fever was transmitted in the eastern United States by ticks In 1929, Dr. George W. McCoy, director of the Hygienic Laboratory, assigned Dyer to join a group of five researchers to continue the work begun by Dr. Kenneth F. Maxcy on the etiology of typhus. Dyer suspected that fleas, rather than lice, were the vector of the American strains of typhus, and he directed his experiments accordingly.
Dyer was fearless as a researcher. Some of his colleagues had died from typhus and other rickettsial diseases they had contracted on the job, but that threat never seemed to bother him. In 1932, he contracted a severe case of murine typhus while pulverizing infected fleas for analysis. Even during his delirium, he did not abandon his dedication to research; he called for lice and fleas to be brought to his bed and instructed that a color film be made of the entire course of his illness. On another occasion, after he had almost succumbed to another poorly understood rickettsial fever in 1938, he used samples of his own blood to demonstrate that this disease had given him immunity to the deadly Australian Q fever. In 1940, he was able to prove that his illness had in fact been Q fever, rather than some "new" rickettsial disease. Altogether Dyer was attacked four times by the diseases he studied. Having gained renown as an expert on rickettsial diseases, Dyer served from 1936 to 1942 as chief of the NIH Division of Infectious Diseases. From 1942 until his retirement in 1950, he was the medical researchdirector of NIH and assistant surgeon general of the USPHS. Under his tenure, the annual budget of the NIH Research Grants and Fellowships Division, which he founded, grew from $85, 000 to more than $50 million. Dyer can in large measure be credited with launching the official campaign against smoking, insofar as he was on the team of seven scientists from four government agencies who first concluded in 1957 that cigarette smoking is linked to lung cancer. After his retirement from NIH, Dyer served the Emory University School of Medicine as director of research at the Robert Winship Clinic until 1957, then as clinical professor of medicine.
He died in Atlanta, Georgia.
Dyer met Esther Gibney during his internship at Philadelphia General Hospital. They were married on June 24, 1916, and had three children.