Vascular Endothelium [antikvár]

Preface Howai'd Florey contributed outstandingly to our knowledge of the endothelium, both before and after he became world-famous through turning penicillin from the biological curiosity discovered by Fleming in 1929 into the world's most successful curative drug. This Florey did, together with a small team chosen by himself, during the difficult war years 1939-1943; which makes the achievement even more remarkable. It was for penicillin that Florey shared the Nobel Prize with Alexander Fleming and Ernest Chain in 1945, and it was penicillin which established his renown. However, as has been said of Albert Einstein that even if he had never thought of relativity, his explanations of Brownian motion and the photoelectric effect as well as his contribution to quantum theory would have assured his place in scientific history; so too, if Florey had had nothing to do with penicillin, his work on mucus and on endothelium places him amongst the century's great medical scientists. Howard Florey was born in Adelaide, South Australia, in 1898, the son of a footwear manufacturer; he died in Oxford in 1968, a Lord of the Realm and ex-president of the Royal Society. He studied medicine in Adelaide and came to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar in 1922 to begin research under Sir Charles Sherrington. After 2 years he obtained a BSc with a thesis on capillary circulation. In these experiments, in which his attention was directed for the first time towards the endothelium, he showed that inorganic salts and soluble starch could pass out of capillaries into endothelial cells. Apparently Sherrington was keen to retain this excellent research student, but the extreme complexities of neurophysiology had no appeal for Florey (Fig. 1). From the outset he demonstrated an outstanding ability to do well-controlled and technically perfect experiments designed to give straightforward answers to straightforward questions. An admirable and, as it turned out, world-shaking example of this ability occurred many years later with his first demonstration of the astonishing curative power of penicillin; and though topically and chronologically here out of place, it is worth retelling in the words of Gwyn Macfarlane (whose biography of Florey is a masterpiece): "The experiment was done on Saturday 25th May, 1940, the very day on which the British Army was encircled at Dunkirk. Against this gigantic back-cloth, the fate of eight white mice may seem of ridiculously small consequence. And yet it might be argued that in terms of human life and suffering, what followed was of greater importance than all the wars won or lost. Florey started the experiment by injecting each of the eight mice intraperitoneally with about 100 million streptococi. Four of the mice he put back in their cages without further treatment. Of the four remaining mice two received lOmg penicillin by subcutaneous injection and the other two 5mg. The first pair had no further treatment but the other pair received four more injections of 5mg penicillin during the next ten hours. Those interested in the design of biological