Albert Lasker
Clinical Medical Research Award

Acceptance Remarks by Robert Austrian

Termed "Captain of the Man of Death" by Sir William Osler, pneumonia remains the only infectious cause of death among the ten leading causes of death in the United States today.

As I entered medical school just prior to the introduction of the first effective drug for treating pneumococcal infection, I was exposed to a tradition at the Johns Hopkins Hospital of reviewing annually the patients with pneumonia, designed, in Osler's words, "to make the cases teach the lessons of the disease." Several years later, it was my privilege to spend a year in the laboratory of Dr. Colin M. MacLeod, who, had he lived, might be here in my stead. It was he who, in addition to his fundamental role in delineating with Avery and McCarty the genetic function of DNA, first demonstrated conclusively with Dr. Heidelberger the efficacy of vaccines of pneumococcal capsular polysaccharides.

These early experiences aroused my enduring interest in the pneumococcus and in the illnesses it causes, an interest that persisted despite the impact of penicillin in improving the outlook for those with pneumococcal infections.

Clinical investigations conducted in the 1950s, a time when concern with such infections had waned, showed clearly that antibiotics were not the final solution. If those at high risk were to be spared, it would be necessary to improve their treatment or to prevent them from becoming ill. Because the groundwork for a prophylactic vaccine had already been laid, the latter approach was followed; and, as a result of the efforts of many individuals, a highly complex vaccine is now available for preventing a significant portion of pneumococcal infection. The challenge for the future of this and of most other infectious diseases remains to discover how pathogenic microbes injure the hosts they invade and how to prevent or to correct such injury.

To have been permitted to work in these areas of biology and medicine has been a privileged existence. In accepting this 1978 Albert Lasker Clinical Research Award, I am most grateful. I do accept it on behalf of all who have contributed so much to this undertaking.