Portrait of Oswald T. Avery. 1940s. Extracted from Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of The Royal Society.
School period
College/University
Gallery of Oswald Theodore Avery
Colgate University, 13 Oak Dr, Hamilton, New York, United States
Avery received an A.B. degree from Colgate University in 1900. (Photo represents the East and West Halls, the oldest residential halls of the Colgate University.)
Gallery of Oswald Theodore Avery
Columbia University College, New York City, New York United States
Avery received a medical degree from Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York City in 1904.
Career
Gallery of Oswald Theodore Avery
1930
Oswald Theodore Avery, 1930s.
Gallery of Oswald Theodore Avery
1937
Oswald Theodore Avery in his office, 1937.
Gallery of Oswald Theodore Avery
1937
Oswald T. Avery (1877-1955) Canadian-American medical researcher in 1937.
Gallery of Oswald Theodore Avery
1940
The American bacteriologist of Canadian origin Oswald Theodore Avery shows that the agent responsible for the transfer of genetic information is not a protein, as the biochemists believed, but the nucleic acid called deoxyribonucleic acid or DNA. 1940.
Gallery of Oswald Theodore Avery
1940
Oswald T. Avery in the lab., c.1940.
Gallery of Oswald Theodore Avery
1940
Oswald T. Avery in the laboratory. Rockefeller Archive Center.
Gallery of Oswald Theodore Avery
Portraits of Oswald T. Avery and Maclyn McCarty, Rockefeller University, Flexner Hall, New York.
Achievements
Photograph: X-ray diffraction image of the double helix.
Membership
Awards
Copley Medal
In 1945 Oswald Avery was awarded the Copley Medal of the Royal Society of London.
Kober Medal
In 1945 Oswald Avery was awarded the of Kober Medal of the Association of American Physicians.
Albert Lasker Award
In 1947 Oswald Avery was awarded the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research.
The American bacteriologist of Canadian origin Oswald Theodore Avery shows that the agent responsible for the transfer of genetic information is not a protein, as the biochemists believed, but the nucleic acid called deoxyribonucleic acid or DNA. 1940.
Colgate University, 13 Oak Dr, Hamilton, New York, United States
Avery received an A.B. degree from Colgate University in 1900. (Photo represents the East and West Halls, the oldest residential halls of the Colgate University.)
In 1945 Oswald Avery was awarded the of Kober Medal of the Association of American Physicians.
Connections
collaborator: Alphonse Raymond Dochez
Alphonse Raymond Dochez (April 21, 1882 – June 30, 1964) was an American physician and microbiologist. His research focused on infectious diseases including scarlet fever, the common cold, and pneumococcal pneumonia. Dochez is credited with developing the first effective treatment for scarlet fever. His work also established viruses as the cause of the common cold.
co-author: Colin Munro MacLeod
Colin Munro MacLeod (January 28, 1909 – February 11, 1972) was a Canadian-American geneticist. He was one of a trio of scientists who discovered that deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA is responsible for the transformation of the physical characteristics of bacteria, which subsequently led to its identification as the molecule responsible for heredity.
associate: Frederick Griffith
Frederick Griffith (1879–1941) was a British bacteriologist whose focus was the epidemiology and pathology of bacterial pneumonia. In January 1928 he reported what is now known as Griffith's Experiment, the first widely accepted demonstrations of bacterial transformation, whereby a bacterium distinctly changes its form and function.
colleague: Michael Heidelberger
Michael Heidelberger, 1888 – 1991, American immunologist. He and Oswald Avery showed that the polysaccharides of pneumococcus are antigens, enabling him to show that antibodies are proteins.
colleague: Maclyn McCarty
Maclyn McCarty (June 9, 1911 – January 2, 2005) was an American geneticist.
Theodore Oswald Avery was an American-Canadian physician and bacteriologist. He is considered to be one of the founding fathers of immunochemistry and a major contributor to the scientific evolution of microbiology. He is famous for discovering the role of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) in the transformation of one strain of pneumococcus (the bacterium causing pneumonia) into another strain.
Background
Theodore Oswald Avery was born on October 21, 1877, in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, to Joseph Francis and Elizabeth Crowdy Avery. His father was a native of England and a clergyman in the Baptist church, with which Avery was to maintain a lifelong affiliation. In 1887 the Avery family immigrated to the United States and settled in New York City, where Avery was to spend nearly sixty-one years of his life.
Education
Avery received an Bachelor of Arts degree from Colgate University in 1900 and later received his Doctor of Medicine degree from Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1904.
After receiving his M. D. degree from Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1904, Avery held the clinical practice of general surgery for three years but soon turned to research and became associate director of the bacteriology division at the Hoagland Laboratory in Brooklyn. Although his time at the laboratory enabled him to study species of bacteria and their relationship to infectious diseases and was a precursor to his interest in immunology, much of his work was spent carrying out what he considered to be routine investigations. Eventually, Rufus Cole, director of the Rockefeller Institute hospital, became acquainted with Avery's research, which included work of general bacteriological interest, such as determining the optimum and limiting hydrogen-ion concentration for pneumococcus growth, developing a simple and rapid method for differentiating human and bovine streptococcus hemolyticus, and studying bacterial nutrition. Impressed with Avery's analytical capabilities, Cole asked Avery to join the institute hospital in 1913. Avery spent the remainder of his career there.
At the institute, Avery teamed up with A. Raymond Dochez in the study of the pneumococci (pneumonia) viruses, an area that was to take up a large part of his research efforts over the next several decades. Although Dochez eventually was to leave the institute, he and Avery maintained a lifelong scientific collaboration. During their early time together at the Rockefeller Institute, the two scientists further classified types of pneumococci found in patients and carriers, an effort which led to a better understanding of pneumococcus lung infection and of the causes, incidence, and distribution of lobar pneumonia. During the course of these immunological classification studies, Avery and Dochez discovered specific soluble substances of pneumococcus during growth in a cultured medium. Their subsequent identification of these substances in the blood and urine of lobar pneumonia patients showed that the substances were the result of a true metabolic process and not merely a result of disintegration during cell death.
Avery was convinced that the soluble specific substances present in pneumococci were somehow related to the immunological specificity of bacteria. In 1922, working with Michael Heidelberger and others at Rockefeller, Avery began to focus his studies on the chemical nature of these substances and eventually identified polysaccharides (complex carbohydrates) as the soluble specific substances of pneumococcus. As a result, Avery and colleagues were the first to show that carbohydrates were involved in immune reactions. His laboratory at Rockefeller went on to demonstrate that these substances, which come from the cell wall (specifically the capsular envelopes of the bacteria), can be differentiated into several different serological types by virtue of the various chemical compositions depending on the type of pneumococcus. For example, the polysaccharide in type 1 pneumococci is nitrogen-containing and partly composed of galacturonic acid. Both types 2 and 3 pneumococci contain nitrogen-free carbohydrates as their soluble substances, but the carbohydrates in type 2 are made up mainly of glucose and those of type 3 are composed of aldobionic acid units. Avery and Heidelberger went on to show that these various chemical substances account for bacterial specificity. This work opened up a new era in biochemical research, particularly in establishing the immunologic identity of the cell.
In addition to clarifying and systemizing efforts in bacteriology and immunology, Avery's work laid the foundation for modern immunological investigations in the area of antigens (parts of proteins and carbohydrates) as essential molecular markers that stimulate and, in large part, determine the success of immunological responses. Avery and his colleagues had found that specific anti-infection antibodies worked by neutralizing the bacterial capsular polysaccharide's ability to interfere with phagocytosis (the production of immune cells that recognize and attack foreign material). Eventually, Avery's discoveries led scientists to develop immunizations that worked by preventing an antigenic response from the capsular material. Avery also oversaw studies that showed similar immunological responses in Klebsiella pneumonia and Hemophilus influenza. These studies resulted in highly specific diagnostic tests and preparation of immunizing antigens and therapeutic sera. The culmination of Avery's work in this area was a paper he coauthored with Colin Munro MacLeod and Maclyn McCarty in 1944 entitled "Studies on the Chemical Nature of the Substance Inducing Transformation of Pneumococcal Types. Induction of Transformation by a Desoxyribonucleic Fraction Isolated from Pneumococcus Type III. " In their article, which appeared in the Journal of Experimental Medicine, the scientists provided conclusive data that DNA is the molecular basis for transmitting genetic information in biological self-replication.
In 1931 Avery's focus turned to "transformation" in bacteria, building on the studies of microbiologist Frederick Griffith showing that viruses could transfer virulence. In 1928, Griffith first showed that heat-killed virulent pneumococci could make a nonvirulent strain become virulent (produce disease). In 1932 Griffith stunned the scientific world when he announced that he had manipulated immunological specificity in pneumococci. At the time, Avery was on leave suffering from Grave's disease. He initially denounced Griffith's claim and cited inadequate experimental controls. But in 1931, after returning to work, Avery began to study transmissible hereditary changes in immunological specificity, which were confirmed by several scientists. His subsequent investigations produced one of the great milestones in biology.
In 1933 Avery's associate, James Alloway had isolated a crude solution of the transforming agent. Immediately, the laboratory's focus turned on purifying this material. Working with type 3 capsulated pneumococcus, Avery eventually succeeded in isolating a highly purified solution of the transforming agent that could pass on the capsular polysaccharides' hereditary information to noncapsulated strains. As a result, the noncapsulated strains could now produce capsular polysaccharides, a trait continued in following generations. The substance responsible for the transfer of genetic information was DNA. These studies also were the first to alter hereditary material for treatment purposes.
Avery, however, remained cautious about the implications of the discovery, suspecting that yet another chemical component of DNA could be responsible for the phenomenon. But further work by McCarty and Moses Kunitz confirmed the findings. While some scientists, such as Peter Brian Medawar, hailed Avery's discovery as the first step out of the "dark ages" of genetics, others refused to give up the long-held notion that the protein was the basis of physical inheritance. The subsequent modeling of the DNA molecule by James Watson and Francis Crick led to an understanding of how DNA replicates, and demonstration of DNA's presence in all animals produced clear evidence of its essential role in heredity.
Avery also continued to work on other antigenic aspects of carbohydrates and the immune system. He was the first to create antibody-based treatments that were successful in protecting laboratory animals from infection, essentially by removing the protective capsular coat of the virulent cell. Collaborating with Dochez, he immunologically classified hemolytic (destructive to blood cells) streptococcus and identified many of the specific antigens at work. These efforts revealed that hemolytic streptococcus had many serological types. Eventually, hemolytic streptococcus was identified as the infectious agent in scarlet and acute rheumatic fever and hemorrhagic nephritis (kidney disease). Avery's work was the foundation for the eventual discovery of effective antibiotics for hemolytic streptococcus.
An independent Republican, he was a commissioned captain in the U. S. Army Medical Corps during World War I, assigned to the Institute for Medical Research. He served on various advisory committees during World War II, including the U. S. Army Board for the Study and Control of Epidemic Disease.
He continued to conduct research in laboratories at the Rockefeller Institute Hospital for several years after his retirement. Eventually, he moved to Nashville, Tennessee, in 1947. He died there on February 20, 1955.
In his political affiliation Oswald Avery was a Republican.
Views
Educated in music and the humanities, nobody expected Oswald T Avery's drastic turn when he opted to study medicine at university. He soon discovered that research pleased him more than clinical practice.
Quotations:
"Whenever you fall, pick something up."
"If the results of the present study on the chemical nature of the transforming principle are confirmed, then nucleic acids must be regarded as possessing biological specificity the chemical basis of which is as yet undetermined."
"Biologists have long attempted by chemical means to induce in higher organisms predictable and specific changes which thereafter could be transmitted in series as hereditary characters. Among microorganisms the most striking example of inheritable and specific alterations in cell structure and function that can be experimentally induced and are reproducible under well defined and adequately controlled conditions is the transformation of specific types of Pneumococcus."
Membership
Avery was a member of the Royal Society of London.
Personality
A private man, Oswald Avery guarded his personal life, even from his colleagues, and seldom spoke of his past. He believed that research should be the primary basis of evaluation for a scientific life, extending his disregard for personal matters to the point that he once refused to include details of a colleague's personal life in an obituary. Avery's argument was that knowledge of matters outside of the laboratory has no bearing on the understanding of a scientist's accomplishment.
Despite the fact that Avery guarded his personal life, some information is known about his interests outside of science. A musician, he played cornet with the New York Conservatory of Music Orchestra and organized his own band. He also painted watercolors.
Interests
playing cornet, painting watercolors
Connections
Avery, who never married, managed to keep his own personal affairs out of the public eye.
Oswald Avery and the Story of DNA
Written especially for young adult readers, this series helps place each significant invention, discovery, or development in historical perspective while exploring the life of the person responsible for each breakthrough. Readers will travel back in time to learn about each important scientific, medical, or technological discovery. No science fiction story even approximates the mystery and suspense contained in these true science biographies.His research led to a new understanding of DNA which led to DNA fingerprinting, and paternity testing
2001
The Professor, the Institute, and DNA
Avery is chiefly known as the senior author of a paper published in 1944 that identified DNA as the purveyor of genetic information.
In 1947 Oswald Avery was awarded the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research issued by the Lasker Foundation for the outstanding discovery, Contribution and achievement in the field of medicine and Human Physiology.
In 1947 Oswald Avery was awarded the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research issued by the Lasker Foundation for the outstanding discovery, Contribution and achievement in the field of medicine and Human Physiology.