Thomas Francis, Jr.
Thomas Francis Jr. ( born July 15, 1900 in Gas City, Indiana; † 1 October 1969 in Ann Arbor ( Michigan)) was an American physician, virologist and epidemiologist. Francis the first to isolate Americans the flu virus. He showed in 1940 that there are other types of influenza and was involved in the development of influenza vaccines, but also involved polio vaccinations.
Life and scientific achievements
Francis grew up in western Pennsylvania. He graduated in 1921, his funded by a scholarship studies at Allegheny College in Meadville, PA from and received medical doctorate from Yale University in 1925. Thereafter, he joined a research team at the Rockefeller Institute and was first with the research for vaccines against bacterial pneumonia is concerned, he later took on the influenza research. He became the first American who isolated the human flu virus.
From 1938 to 1941 he was Professor and Head of Department of Bacteriology at the College of Medicine of New York University.
1941 Francis was appointed Head of the flu Commission of the United States Armed Forces Epidemiological Board ( AfDB ), a position which enabled him to contribute to the successful development, as well as field trials and evaluation of influenza vaccinations. Later in the same year he was invited by Henry F. Vaughan, at the newly established College of Public Health ( School of Public Health ) at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor cooperate. At the University of Michigan Francis built a virus laboratory and epidemiology department that dealt with a variety of infectious diseases. When Jonas Salk in 1941 for graduate studies in virology at the University in Ann Arbor, Francis became his teacher and taught him the methods of vaccine development. Salk's work in Michigan eventually led to his polio vaccine.
1947 Francis was awarded the title of Henry Sewall University Professor of Epidemiology. In addition to his work in the School of Public Health Francis also worked at the medical faculty in the Department of Pediatrics with. He also served in the years 1949/1950 as president of the American Association of Immunologists. As director of the Center for the Evaluation of polio vaccinations at the University of Michigan planned and led Francis a completely new nationwide field trial, which cost $ 17.5 million to test the vaccine. With the participation of more than one hundred employees of the University of Michigan the years of experiment recorded 1.8 million children in the U.S., Canada, and Finland and required the cooperation of an extensive network of volunteers on site. On April 12, 1955 Francis was able to announce that the Salksche vaccination " safe, effective and potent " was.
1933 Thomas Francis Dorothy Packard Otton had married and had two children.
" The epidemiology must be constantly on the lookout for imaginative and gifted teachers and researchers to produce a new type of medical ecologists, explaining the delicate sensibility of scientific artist and the coarse perception of the sculptor, the interplay of forces that cause disease, can. "