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Jean Lindenmann
MRC National Institute for Medical Research
Obituary
Jean Lindenmann Virologist and codiscoverer of interferon. Born in Zagreb, Croatia, on Sept 18, 1924, he died in Zurich, Switzerland, on Jan 15, 2015, aged 91 years. On account of a supposed promise to cure everything from cancer to the common cold, the early years of interferon saw it portrayed as a potential wonder drug. It wasn’t the first product of biomedical research to be so inaccurately feted, and it won’t be the last; but whether or not its codiscoverer, Jean Lindenmann, was subsequently embarrassed by the overblown expectations, he was certainly aware of them. Speaking to Nature in 2007 he said that it had been “hyped shamelessly”. He added that scientists had not been entirely innocent in this. “It was a way of getting research money.” The young Lindenmann’s original goal had been to study physics, and he was 18 months into a course at the University of Zurich before the dropping of the atom bomb engendered a change of heart. He switched to medicine, qualifying in the early 1950s and joining the university’s Institute of Hygiene to begin postgraduate work in diagnostic bacteriology. At that time Swiss medical microbiology had become ossified at its prewar level. To remedy this the Swiss Academy of Medical Sciences created year-long fellowships for training young investigators abroad. Lindenmann was awarded one in 1956, and chose the UK’s National Institute for Medical Research (NIMR) at Mill Hill in north London as a good place at which to learn some new virology. “The fellowship paid £5 a week which was sufficient for survival”, he later wrote. The then head of bacteriology and virus research at Mill Hill, Sir Christopher Andrewes, suggested that 850
Lindenmann try growing polio virus in a culture of a rabbit kidney tissue. “I failed miserably”, Lindenmann said, “but learned quite a few things”. More to the point, perhaps, he met Alick Isaacs, a medical graduate from the University of Glasgow who had built a reputation in scientific virology. Lindenmann told Isaacs about some then unpublished experiments he had done in Zurich exploring how the presence of one virus can interfere with the capacity of another to cause an infection. This discussion sparked Isaacs’s imagination. The pair set to work, but using an experimental arrangement rather different from that previously used by Lindenmann. One witness to this emerging collaboration was a newly recruited chemist, Derek Burke, later to become ViceChancellor of the University of East Anglia but at that time recently returned to the UK after a post-doctoral fellowship at Yale University. Lindenmann’s year at Mill Hill overlapped by 9 months with Burke’s tenure, and they often worked in the same lab. “He was an intelligent and able man”, says Burke. “He’d already published a paper with his senior worker in Switzerland on interference and viral growth.” The mechanism of this interference was, at that time, unknown—and this is what the pair, later helped by Burke, set out to unravel. Using influenza A virus and the chorioallantoic membrane of chick embryos they showed that the interference was mediated by molecules they dubbed interferons. Burke remembers Lindenmann as temperamentally very different from Isaacs. While the latter was a spirited man given to whistling operatic arias which his colleagues had to identify, Lindenmann was quiet and reserved. “They had to work at overcoming these differences”, Burke suspects. Lindenmann had arrived at NIMR with little experience of research in virology, and even less of working independently in a lab like Mill Hill. “I think he was probably a bit overawed”, Burke adds. “Mill Hill was a buzzing place.” Staff were expected to fend for themselves in what was, for Lindenmann, something of a baptism by fire. “But it was one he responded to. Under the influence of Alick he began to change. It was a turning point in his scientific career.” On returning to Switzerland, Lindenmann chose not to follow the obvious path and continue studying interferon. He preferred to leave this to others. After a brief period in public health, he obtained another research fellowship, this time at the University of Florida. 2 years later he returned again to Switzerland and joined the University of Zurich’s new Institute of Immunology and Virology which, from 1980 to 1992, he went on to direct. Among the topics on which he worked were oncolytic viruses, and also the differing degree of resistance to infection in different strains of mice. The latter turned out to be mediated by none other than interferon. So the molecular family he thought he’d left behind made a further appearance in his life. Lindenmann is survived by two sons.
Geoff Watts www.thelancet.com Vol 385 March 7, 2015
Obituary
Jean Lindenmann Virologist and codiscoverer of interferon. Born in Zagreb, Croatia, on Sept 18, 1924, he died in Zurich, Switzerland, on Jan 15, 2015, aged 91 years. On account of a supposed promise to cure everything from cancer to the common cold, the early years of interferon saw it portrayed as a potential wonder drug. It wasn’t the first product of biomedical research to be so inaccurately feted, and it won’t be the last; but whether or not its codiscoverer, Jean Lindenmann, was subsequently embarrassed by the overblown expectations, he was certainly aware of them. Speaking to Nature in 2007 he said that it had been “hyped shamelessly”. He added that scientists had not been entirely innocent in this. “It was a way of getting research money.” The young Lindenmann’s original goal had been to study physics, and he was 18 months into a course at the University of Zurich before the dropping of the atom bomb engendered a change of heart. He switched to medicine, qualifying in the early 1950s and joining the university’s Institute of Hygiene to begin postgraduate work in diagnostic bacteriology. At that time Swiss medical microbiology had become ossified at its prewar level. To remedy this the Swiss Academy of Medical Sciences created year-long fellowships for training young investigators abroad. Lindenmann was awarded one in 1956, and chose the UK’s National Institute for Medical Research (NIMR) at Mill Hill in north London as a good place at which to learn some new virology. “The fellowship paid £5 a week which was sufficient for survival”, he later wrote. The then head of bacteriology and virus research at Mill Hill, Sir Christopher Andrewes, suggested that 850
Lindenmann try growing polio virus in a culture of a rabbit kidney tissue. “I failed miserably”, Lindenmann said, “but learned quite a few things”. More to the point, perhaps, he met Alick Isaacs, a medical graduate from the University of Glasgow who had built a reputation in scientific virology. Lindenmann told Isaacs about some then unpublished experiments he had done in Zurich exploring how the presence of one virus can interfere with the capacity of another to cause an infection. This discussion sparked Isaacs’s imagination. The pair set to work, but using an experimental arrangement rather different from that previously used by Lindenmann. One witness to this emerging collaboration was a newly recruited chemist, Derek Burke, later to become ViceChancellor of the University of East Anglia but at that time recently returned to the UK after a post-doctoral fellowship at Yale University. Lindenmann’s year at Mill Hill overlapped by 9 months with Burke’s tenure, and they often worked in the same lab. “He was an intelligent and able man”, says Burke. “He’d already published a paper with his senior worker in Switzerland on interference and viral growth.” The mechanism of this interference was, at that time, unknown—and this is what the pair, later helped by Burke, set out to unravel. Using influenza A virus and the chorioallantoic membrane of chick embryos they showed that the interference was mediated by molecules they dubbed interferons. Burke remembers Lindenmann as temperamentally very different from Isaacs. While the latter was a spirited man given to whistling operatic arias which his colleagues had to identify, Lindenmann was quiet and reserved. “They had to work at overcoming these differences”, Burke suspects. Lindenmann had arrived at NIMR with little experience of research in virology, and even less of working independently in a lab like Mill Hill. “I think he was probably a bit overawed”, Burke adds. “Mill Hill was a buzzing place.” Staff were expected to fend for themselves in what was, for Lindenmann, something of a baptism by fire. “But it was one he responded to. Under the influence of Alick he began to change. It was a turning point in his scientific career.” On returning to Switzerland, Lindenmann chose not to follow the obvious path and continue studying interferon. He preferred to leave this to others. After a brief period in public health, he obtained another research fellowship, this time at the University of Florida. 2 years later he returned again to Switzerland and joined the University of Zurich’s new Institute of Immunology and Virology which, from 1980 to 1992, he went on to direct. Among the topics on which he worked were oncolytic viruses, and also the differing degree of resistance to infection in different strains of mice. The latter turned out to be mediated by none other than interferon. So the molecular family he thought he’d left behind made a further appearance in his life. Lindenmann is survived by two sons.
Geoff Watts www.thelancet.com Vol 385 March 7, 2015