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Biomedical Patriarch
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20518 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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| Issue
Date : |
5 / 1992 |
2,744 Words |
| Author
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Lynn Hartley
Lynn Hartley is a Philadelphia-based journalist who
specializes in business and science. |
On the bustling campus of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, sitting on a slight rise, is the imposing Victorian brick façade of the Wistar Institute, the oldest independent non-profit biomedical research and training institution in the United States.
The nearby Wharton School of Business may be better known to the general public, but in the scientific community, Wistar is known as one of the top research organizations in the United States. "A remarkable national resource" is how it was described by a review committee.
And in a building abounding in centrifuges and cell counters, researchers are unlocking the genetic codes of diseases. Others complement this work by studying the microscopic paths traveled at the cellular level in the journey from health to sickness.
In a series of infinitesimally small steps, great leaps in knowledge can be made, for example, by studying DNA sequences and the proteins they bind with, producing molecular changes that cause mutations in a cell that can replicate and manifest as a particular disease.
Specializing in cancer research, immunology, and viral diseases, the institute began as a museum in 1892. It was founded by Gen. Isaac Wistar, a Civil War veteran, to display the anatomical collection of his great uncle, Dr. Caspar Wistar.
Dr. Wistar, a prominent Philadelphia physician from a Quaker family, received his medical degree from the University of Edinburgh in 1786. A staff physician at area hospitals, including the country's oldest, Pennsylvania Hospital, he became chair of the Department of Anatomy at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine in 1808.
Teaching anatomy without visual aids was difficult, so Dr. Wistar began collecting dried, embalmed, and preserved human specimens along with was and wooden models of the human body.
In 1811 he wrote and published System of Anatomy, the first standard anatomical textbook written in America. Active in the social and intellectual life of the city's elite, he succeeded Thomas Jefferson as president of the American Philosophical Society, the oldest learned society in the United States, founded by Benjamin Franklin.
Dr. Wistar's great-nephew,
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