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William Trager
©Ingbert Gruttner
Obituary
William Trager Prominent parasitologist who was first to culture Plasmodium falciparum outside of an organism. Born March 20, 1910, in Newark, NJ, USA, he died after a heart attack on Jan 22, 2005, in New York, NY, USA, aged 94 years. William Trager used to say that “you can’t study something that you can’t grow”. Trager, who solved that problem for Plasmodium falciparum in 1976 when he and James Jensen were the first to culture the parasite outside of a living animal, was “one of the great parasitologists”, said Larry Simpson, who earned his PhD in Trager’s laboratory at Rockefeller University, New York, NY, in the 1960s. “I feel that he ranks up there with Ronald Ross, Carlos Chagas, and David Bruce. Yet during much of his career he was greatly underappreciated outside of parasitology. He finally received international acclaim after his discovery of the culture of P falciparum.” “It has been estimated that malaria research between 1976 and 1986 was up more than 800% compared with 1966 to 1976”, said Jensen. “Undoubtedly, most of this increase in research was due to the fact that the parasites could be grown readily in nearly any moderately equipped laboratory.” It was critical, said Dennis Lynn of the University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario, Canada, that malaria researchers be freed from the need to use difficult-to-obtain animal models. Trager’s research career began with insect cultivation, and he developed the first bacteria-free culture system for mosquito larvae. His doctoral research, which he did under L R Cleveland at Harvard University, was on termite flagellates. In 1933, he became a fellow of the National Research Council at the Rockefeller Institute’s department of animal pathology in Princeton, NJ, USA; the department later moved to the main Rockefeller campus in Manhattan when the Princeton campus closed. Trager began as a staff 748
member at Rockefeller in 1934, and would remain there for the rest of his career, becoming an emeritus professor in 1980. While there, he developed methods for culturing silkworm, mosquito, and tsetse fly tissues, which allowed propagation of a number of parasites in those tissues. In 1939, Trager discovered acquired immunity to ixodid ticks. After that, he began his work on malaria, beginning with avian Plasmodium. “He was always interested in growing things”, said Irwin Sherman, of the University of California at Riverside, CA. “He knew that if you understood the nutritional needs of a parasite, you would understand the molecular basis of parasitism.” “Once you’ve got [a culture] established, you can start removing bits from it and discovering what is crucial in that medium for that parasite”, Lynn, editorin-chief of Eukaryotic Microbiology, told The Lancet. “And removing those requirements could lead you to speculate what drugs might be effective.” Eukaryotic Microbiology is the descendant of Journal of Protozoology, of which Trager was the founding editor. Trager “donated much of his time and energy to promoting science everywhere,” Jensen told The Lancet. “Bill sacrificed his own time, and mine too, to hold international training workshops all over the world . . . We probably spent a good 2 years training others at the expense of our own research. But Trager never turned down an opportunity to expand the usefulness of new knowledge.” Trager was “very detail-oriented” in his experimental method and “meticulous in his analysis”, Sherman said. “He weighed out every compound, made the solutions himself, and filtered them, when he was making his cultures”, Sherman told The Lancet. “He would have his technician cover the slides so he wouldn’t know the treatments.” He was also meticulous about his daily routine, arriving at 8 am and going right to work in his lab, “which was off limits to everyone except his personal technician and lab assistant”, Jensen said. No-one dared disturb him in his laboratory, and he would leave exactly at 4·45 pm to catch a train from Grand Central Station home to Scarsdale, NY. “Once, while we were deep into discussions on cultivation of malaria, he stood up, put on his coat and left the office”, Jensen said. “I was so engrossed in my descriptions of the lab work that I followed him out, we walked fast to Grand Central, talking all the way right up to the train. When the door opened Trager got in and said ‘See you tomorrow’, leaving me on the platform with no coat and somewhat speechless.” Trager, whose wife Ida Sosnow died last year, is survived by a son and two daughters.
Ivan Oransky [email protected]
www.thelancet.com Vol 365 February 26, 2005
Obituary
William Trager Prominent parasitologist who was first to culture Plasmodium falciparum outside of an organism. Born March 20, 1910, in Newark, NJ, USA, he died after a heart attack on Jan 22, 2005, in New York, NY, USA, aged 94 years. William Trager used to say that “you can’t study something that you can’t grow”. Trager, who solved that problem for Plasmodium falciparum in 1976 when he and James Jensen were the first to culture the parasite outside of a living animal, was “one of the great parasitologists”, said Larry Simpson, who earned his PhD in Trager’s laboratory at Rockefeller University, New York, NY, in the 1960s. “I feel that he ranks up there with Ronald Ross, Carlos Chagas, and David Bruce. Yet during much of his career he was greatly underappreciated outside of parasitology. He finally received international acclaim after his discovery of the culture of P falciparum.” “It has been estimated that malaria research between 1976 and 1986 was up more than 800% compared with 1966 to 1976”, said Jensen. “Undoubtedly, most of this increase in research was due to the fact that the parasites could be grown readily in nearly any moderately equipped laboratory.” It was critical, said Dennis Lynn of the University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario, Canada, that malaria researchers be freed from the need to use difficult-to-obtain animal models. Trager’s research career began with insect cultivation, and he developed the first bacteria-free culture system for mosquito larvae. His doctoral research, which he did under L R Cleveland at Harvard University, was on termite flagellates. In 1933, he became a fellow of the National Research Council at the Rockefeller Institute’s department of animal pathology in Princeton, NJ, USA; the department later moved to the main Rockefeller campus in Manhattan when the Princeton campus closed. Trager began as a staff 748
member at Rockefeller in 1934, and would remain there for the rest of his career, becoming an emeritus professor in 1980. While there, he developed methods for culturing silkworm, mosquito, and tsetse fly tissues, which allowed propagation of a number of parasites in those tissues. In 1939, Trager discovered acquired immunity to ixodid ticks. After that, he began his work on malaria, beginning with avian Plasmodium. “He was always interested in growing things”, said Irwin Sherman, of the University of California at Riverside, CA. “He knew that if you understood the nutritional needs of a parasite, you would understand the molecular basis of parasitism.” “Once you’ve got [a culture] established, you can start removing bits from it and discovering what is crucial in that medium for that parasite”, Lynn, editorin-chief of Eukaryotic Microbiology, told The Lancet. “And removing those requirements could lead you to speculate what drugs might be effective.” Eukaryotic Microbiology is the descendant of Journal of Protozoology, of which Trager was the founding editor. Trager “donated much of his time and energy to promoting science everywhere,” Jensen told The Lancet. “Bill sacrificed his own time, and mine too, to hold international training workshops all over the world . . . We probably spent a good 2 years training others at the expense of our own research. But Trager never turned down an opportunity to expand the usefulness of new knowledge.” Trager was “very detail-oriented” in his experimental method and “meticulous in his analysis”, Sherman said. “He weighed out every compound, made the solutions himself, and filtered them, when he was making his cultures”, Sherman told The Lancet. “He would have his technician cover the slides so he wouldn’t know the treatments.” He was also meticulous about his daily routine, arriving at 8 am and going right to work in his lab, “which was off limits to everyone except his personal technician and lab assistant”, Jensen said. No-one dared disturb him in his laboratory, and he would leave exactly at 4·45 pm to catch a train from Grand Central Station home to Scarsdale, NY. “Once, while we were deep into discussions on cultivation of malaria, he stood up, put on his coat and left the office”, Jensen said. “I was so engrossed in my descriptions of the lab work that I followed him out, we walked fast to Grand Central, talking all the way right up to the train. When the door opened Trager got in and said ‘See you tomorrow’, leaving me on the platform with no coat and somewhat speechless.” Trager, whose wife Ida Sosnow died last year, is survived by a son and two daughters.
Ivan Oransky [email protected]
www.thelancet.com Vol 365 February 26, 2005