Peter Alfred Gorer

Peter Alfred Gorer ( born April 14, 1907 in London, † May 11, 1961 ) was a British pathologist, immunologist and geneticist. He worked from 1934 to 1940 at the Lister Institute of Preventive Medicine and then at Guy's Hospital, where he worked as a lecturer in Experimental Pathology in 1947. His scientific achievements include in particular the discovery of the H- 2 antigens of the mouse. He is for this reason as one of the leading immunologists of his time and as co-founder of Immunogenetics.

Life

Peter Gorer was born in London in 1907. His father, an art dealer and expert on Chinese porcelain, died in 1915 at the sinking of the RMS Lusitania; his older brother Geoffrey Edgar Gorer (1905-1985) worked as a social anthropologist. In September 1924 he began at Guy's Hospital in his hometown, first a study of dentistry, but three months later he switched to medicine. He obtained in 1929 a B.Sc. in Physiology and completed three years later, his clinical training from. After a subsequent stay at University College London, where he focused particularly with Genetics at JBS Haldane, he went in 1934 at the Lister Institute of Preventive Medicine in London, where he remained until 1940.

In the same year he returned to the Guy 's Hospital, where he worked during the Second World War as a hematologist and pathologist and rarely busy at this time with research. After the war he spent 1946/1947 with a grant from the National Institutes of Health a year in the U.S. on Roscoe B. Jackson Memorial Laboratory in Bar Harbor, where he worked among others with the later Nobel laureate George Davis Snell. After his return to England he was appointed to the faculty at Guy's Hospital for Experimental Pathology.

Peter Gorer was married from 1942 to his first marriage, his wife, however, died in May 1945 of tuberculosis. During his time in Bar Harbor, he met his second wife, with whom he was married in 1947 and had a son and a daughter. He died in 1961 at the age of 54 in his hometown at the consequences of a cancer-related pulmonary edema and thus did not live to the establishment of a Chair of Immunology at Guy's Hospital, for which he was provided as the first owner.

Scientific work

Peter Gorer, who published around 50 scientific publications, devoted in particular the Immunogenetics and the immunological aspects of transplantation. In studies on the transplantation of tumors in mice, he discovered the H- 2 antigens, which influenced the response of different strains of mice to transplanted tumors, and thus the first Major Histocompatibility Complex (Major Histocompatibility Complex, MHC). In addition, he examined genetic variation in the susceptibility of mice to bacterial infections.

Awards

Peter Gorer was inducted into the Royal Society in 1960 and was awarded posthumously in 1975 as one of 16 scientists who have been honored as the founder of Cancer Immunology, the first ever William B. Coley Award for Distinguished Research in Basic and Tumor Immunology. The Peter Gorer Department of Immunobiology, King's College London contributes to the memory of him his name.