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Michael Zasloff: Antibiotic Sleuth
| Article
# : |
13874 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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| Issue
Date : |
12 / 1988 |
1,883 Words |
| Author
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Linda Joyce Forristal with Helmut Muller
Linda Joyce Forristal is a science editor for The World & I.
Helmut Muller is a journalist and photographer with some 40
science films to his credit. He conducted an interview for
this article. |
Determined to escape and oblivious to the pandemonium in its wake, the large frog bounded across a carpeted office on the seventh floor of Philadelphia's Children's Hospital. Were it not for Xenopus laevis, the African clawed frog, Michael A. Zasloff, its pursuer, would not be lauded as having developed a possible successor to penicillin.
The frog's freedom was short-lived. A filing cabinet blocked her path and enabled Zasloff to retrieve her with a practiced grip. Firmly held, the bloated and fearful frog was carried back across the room. Once again she was posed for another photograph; then, with a splash, returned to her companions and the tranquility of the muddy brown water of their aquarium.
The African clawed frog is probably one of the best-known laboratory research animals. Thousands of scientists have written papers on this species, and medical students have performed countless dissections of it. These are the frogs that Zasloff used for his genetic research at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland; but instead of killing his amphibious research subjects, Zasloff sewed them up and watched them recover. Some he kept in an aquarium, others he set free on the lawns of NIH, to the dismay of fellow researchers.
What puzzled him most was that no infections developed at the sites of the frogs' wounds despite the bacteria teeming in their aquarium. "One day it struck me that these frogs heal without any inflammation, without any pus or signs of infection," says Zasloff. Ever curious, he deduced that a chemical defense system separate from the frogs' immune systems was generating some substance in their skin that prevented infection. It was the same system that sterilizes frogs on death. "Have you ever noticed that frogs don't decay but dry out when they are dead? What did primitive tribesmen, who bound frogs to their skin in order to aid the healing process, know centuries before the advent of modern medicine?" he asks.
In all the years of working with the African frog, no one had ever questioned scientifically why frogs' wounds heal in an environment in which human skin would develop countless infections. It was Zasloff who started searching systematically for an explanation.
From Moths to Frogs
A 1981 paper published in Nature by Swedish microbiologist Hans Boman describing the cecropins, a family of peptides
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