Albert Lasker
Clinical Medical Research Award
John Holmes Dingle
Gilbert Dalldorf
Robert Gross
John Holmes Dingle
For outstanding studies which have added significantly to our knowledge and ability to control acute respiratory diseases.
As director of the Commission on Acute Respiratory Diseases, Armed Forces Epidemiological Board and as professor of preventive medicine, Western Reserve University School of Medicine, John Holmes Dingle conceived and carried forward a broad investigative program bearing on all aspects of acute infections of the respiratory tract, including influenza, pneumonia, and the common cold.
The critical and comprehensive studies that he initiated and guided were brought to effective conclusion by carefully selected and highly trained groups of investigators with widely diverse professional backgrounds and interests. No more thorough or systematic investigation of acute respiratory diseases has ever been undertaken and none has been more productive of new knowledge.
Throughout the last two decades, the work of Dr. Dingle and his colleagues has brought new understanding of several disease entities which previously were grouped together merely as undifferentiated acute respiratory infections. It has shed new and revealing light on the specific infections included in the syndromes designated as primary atypical pneumonia, acute respiratory disease, nonbacterial pharyngitis and the common cold. It has led to the development of effective prophylactic procedures which make feasible the prevention of some acute respiratory diseases and raise the possibility that others can be brought under control for the enduring benefit of mankind.
Gilbert Dalldorf
For his demonstration of the ability of one virus to modify the course of infection by another and for his discovery of Coxsackie virus by a unique and broadly applicable technique.
Few in research have the distinction of having contributed highly important information in two quite different fields, and twice, broadly and significantly, in one of them.
Gilbert Dalldorf is in this unique position. In his chosen discipline of pathological anatomy his early studies were of the morphological changes associated with deficiency disease. These were made at a time when the subject was new and its broad implications rarely recognized.
Somewhat later, while carrying heavy general responsibilities, he made the unique observation of "interference," the ability of infection with one virus to modify the course of another. The pertinence of this discovery to our basic understanding of virus infection, the constitution of viruses, and of the potential therapy of virus infection was great. It becomes greater almost daily, 30 years after the original observation.
More recently, again while carrying major responsibility in a different setting, he made a second revolutionary contribution to virology. By the inoculation of diseased tissue into very young animals, Coxsackie virus was uncovered, and so a new disease entity defined. This was not only an important clarification of a medical mystery; the procedure employed opened to productive study the great field of tissue immunity, gave us new means for tissue transplantation, and broadened modern virology and cancer research.
Robert Gross
For distinguished achievement: performing the first successful operation on an inborn cardiovascular defect.