ADLER, SAUL AARON

ADLER, SAUL AARON (1895–1966), Israeli physician and parasitologist. Adler was born in Karelitz, Russia, but was taken to England as a child of five. He studied medicine at Leeds University and specialized in tropical medicine at the University of Liverpool. During World War i he served as a doctor and pathologist with the British armies on the Iraqi front. Between 1921 and 1924 he did research on malaria in Sierra Leone. In 1924 he made his home in Jerusalem and joined the staff of the Hebrew University Medical School. Four years later he was appointed professor and director of the Parasitological Institute of the university. Adler translated Darwin's Origin of Species into Hebrew.

Under the auspices of the British Royal Society, he organized a number of scientific expeditions in the countries and islands of the Mediterranean. He specialized in the etiology and pathology of tropical diseases, the ways in which parasites pathogenic to man and animals are spread, and the immunology of protozoan infections. Adler introduced the Syrian golden hamster (brought to the Hebrew University from Aleppo by Israel *Aharoni) into experimental medicine. His work on malaria, cattle fever, leprosy, and dysentery, and his pioneer research into the Leishmania diseases (the Jericho and kala-azar groups) and their carriers, the sandflies, won him an international reputation. In 1933 Adler was awarded the Chalmers Gold Medal of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene for his work on the transmission of kala-azar by the sandfly. In 1957 he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society.

[Meir Yoeli]