Goodpasture, Ernest William (1886-1960)

American pathologist

Ernest William Goodpasture created a means of culturing viruses in the laboratory without contamination from foreign bacteria . This research was instrumental in the development of most of the vaccines and inoculations used in medicine today. Additionally, Goodpasture developed an alternate way of staining specimens for examination under the microscope . He also pursued research interests in varying other fields of medicine, and identified a progressive and rare immune system illness that became known as Goodpasture's Syndrome.

Goodpasture was born in Montgomery County, Tennessee. He left home to study medicine in 1909, and received his doctorate from Johns Hopkins University. He then served as the Rockefeller Fellow in Pathology until 1914. Goodpasture returned to practicing medicine and served his residency at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston from 1915 to 1917. In 1917, he was offered a professorship at Harvard University, but only remained there for three years. Shortly thereafter, Goodpasture was appointed chair of pathology at Vanderbilt University. The position at Vanderbilt afforded Goodpasture the opportunity to return home, he accepted and remained with the university for the entirety of his career.

In 1931, Goodpasture, working with Alice Woodruff, devised a method for cultivating viruses that revolutionized virology . Because rickettsiae and other viruses will only grow on living tissue, scientists had to study viruses on living hosts or on tissue cells cultures in the lab. Before the advent of antibiotics , lab cultures were often tainted by bacteria. Thus, viruses remained illusive to scientific study. Little was known about their structure and behavior. Goodpasture used fertilized chicken eggs to culture his viruses, a method that proved not only successful, but also cost effective. The team first successfully cultured fowl pox virus, but quickly proved that a multitude of viruses could be studied using the technique. Within a span of a few years, other scientists used Goodpasture's technique to create vaccines for yellow fever , smallpox , and influenza .

Goodpasture himself worked to create a vaccination against the mumps . In 1934, Goodpasture and his colleague, C.D. Johnsen, proved that the mumps virus vas filterable. This prompted to team to devise a method by which the virus could be manipulated to produce a vaccine .

Throughout the course of his career, Goodpasture was chiefly concerned with infectious diseases, but he also conducted research in the formation of various types of cancers and genetic diseases. His name was given to a condition that he discovered working in tandem with doctors at Vanderbilt University Hospital. Goodpasture's Syndrome is a rare and often fatal autoimmune disorder that affects the kidneys.

See also Laboratory techniques in immunology; Laboratory techniques in microbiology