George Hoyt Whipple knew he would be a physician from the time he was in elementary school at the turn of the century. The son and grandson of doctors, Whipple followed the family tradition by choosing a career in medicine, researching the creation and breakdown of oxygen-carrying hemoglobin in the blood; this research resulted in not only a treatment for pernicious anemia, but also in a share of the 1934 Nobel Prize. An industrious, hard-working Yankee from New Hampshire, Whipple authored more than 200 publications on anemia, pigment metabolism, liver injury and repair, and other related subjects. Yet in his last days, it was as an educator that he hoped to be remembered.
Whipple was born on August 28, 1878, in Ashland, New Hampshire, the son of Frances Anna Hoyt Whipple and Ashley Cooper Whipple, a general practitioner held in high esteem by his patients and colleagues. Whipple's father died of typhoid fever just two years after the birth of his son, and Whipple and his sister Ashley were brought up by their mother and grandmothers. His was an outdoor life in rural New Hampshire, and he took a love of hunting, fishing, and camping with him into adulthood. At the age of fourteen Whipple entered Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, enrolling at Yale College (now Yale University) as a premedical student four years later. At Yale, he was a star baseball player and was on the gymnastics and rowing teams, as well as an outstanding student. Though versed in the humanities in these years of public and private schools, he had always been attracted by science and mathematics. After graduating with high standing in 1900, Whipple spent a year teaching and coaching at Holbrook Military Academy in New York to earn money for medical studies, and in 1901 he entered Johns Hopkins University's School of Medicine.
Sets His Course for Research
During his years as a student at Johns Hopkins, Whipple earned his way with a paying instructorship. Initially Whipple had considered going into pediatrics, but upon receiving his M.D. in 1905 instead joined the Johns Hopkins staff as an assistant in pathology, working under the renowned pathologist William Henry Welch. It was as a 29-year-old assistant performing an autopsy on a missionary doctor that Whipple made his first notable medical contribution, describing a rare condition in the intestinal tissues, which has since come to be called Whipple's disease. A year spent at a hospital in the Panama Canal Zone led to further notable advances in malaria and tuberculosis research.
When he returned to Johns Hopkins in 1908, Whipple turned his attention to studies in liver damage and the way in which liver cells repair themselves. Studies with dogs led Whipple to realize the importance of bile, a substance manufactured in the liver by the breakdown of hemoglobin, a complex pigment in red corpuscles. In normal concentrations, bile helps to break down fats during digestion, but can produce jaundice when present in excessive amounts. Beginning his assistant professorship at Johns Hopkins in 1911, Whipple came to focus on the interrelationship of bile, hemoglobin, and the liver. In 1913, along with a talented medical student, Charles W. Hooper, Whipple was able to show that bile pigments could be produced outside of the liver, solely from the breakdown of hemoglobin in the blood. Using this experiment as a starting point, Whipple set a new course for his studies. Since bile pigments are formed from hemoglobin, Whipple reasoned that he should tackle the question of hemoglobin itself, beginning with how it is manufactured. It was a fateful decision.
In 1914 Whipple accepted a position as director of the Hooper Foundation for Medical Research at the University of California in San Francisco. In that same year he also married his long-time sweetheart, Katharine Ball Waring, and the couple moved to California. Though burdened with administrative duties, Whipple continued his researches into hemoglobin production. His assistant, Hooper, came with him to California and together with a new assistant, Frieda Robscheit-Robbins, they began experiments which would lead to a major breakthrough. By systematically bleeding laboratory dogs, Whipple and his team were able to induce a controlled anemic condition. They then tested various foods and their effects upon hemoglobin regeneration, finding that a diet of liver produced a pronounced increase in hemoglobin regeneration. While such short term effects were encouraging, they were still far from conclusive.
Research Proved Conclusive at Rochester
Though in 1920 Whipple was named dean of the University of California Medical School, he remained in California for just a year before accepting (somewhat reluctantly) a similar position at a new medical complex at the University of Rochester in New York--a facility heavily endowed by Kodak founder George Eastman and the Rockefeller Foundation. Courted enthusiastically by Eastman and university president Rush Rhees, Whipple moved home and laboratory to New York, bringing Robscheit-Robbins and the group of anemic dogs with him.
The next decade proved busy for Whipple: he directed the building and staffing of the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry, all the while directing further hemoglobin research. Perfecting their technique of bleeding the dogs, Whipple and Robscheit-Robbins induced long-term anemia and were able to prove conclusively that a liver diet was successful in counteracting its effects by increasing the production of hemoglobin. His results were published in 1925, and the pharmaceutical firm of Eli Lilly, with Whipple's cooperation, began producing a commercially available liver extract within a year. Whipple refused to patent his findings, and directed all royalties from the sales of the extract to fund additional research. Whipple's experiments paved the way for further studies by two Boston researchers, George Richards Minot and William P. Murphy, who used liver therapy to successfully treat pernicious anemia in 1926.
Whipple's work soon won international repute and in 1934 he received word that he, along with Minot and Murphy, was going to receive the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for their separate work in liver therapy. Whipple did not let fame slow him down. He continued his hemoglobin experiments, turning now to the study of iron in the body and utilizing the new technology of radioisotope elements to follow the distribution of iron in the body. He also made important contributions to the study of an anemic disorder peculiar to people of Mediterranean extraction, a disorder for which Whipple suggested the name thalassemia. Other studies involved the use of plasma or tissue proteins to rebuild hemoglobin in cases of anemia. A spin-off of this latter research was the development of intravenous feeding.
Despite the administrative and research duties that pressed upon him, Whipple did not forget his students, and took real pleasure in teaching. When in later years he was offered the position of Director of the Rockefeller Institute, he politely but adamantly declined, preferring his classes and his research. Whipple finally relinquished his chair as dean in 1953 at the age of 75, after a long and distinguished career that had seen the once-small university grow to more than 12,000 graduates in medicine and other related fields. He remained on the faculty of the University of Rochester teaching pathology until 1955. In 1963 he established a medical and dental library for the university valued at $750,000. In addition to the Nobel Prize, Whipple was also a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation from 1927-43, a Kober Medal winner in 1939, and a recipient of the Kovalenko Medal of the National Academy of Sciences in 1962, among others.
Whipple's life was long and productive. He was an active outdoorsman well into his ninth decade. With his wife Katharine, he had two children: a son, Hoyt, who followed in the Whipple tradition of medicine, and a daughter, Barbara. He died in Rochester on February 1, 1976, in the hospital he had helped to build.
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