William P. Murphy Biography

William P. Murphy received the 1934 Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine for his role in the discovery of liver as the successful dietary treatment for pernicious anemia, a deadly disorder in which bone marrow ceases to produce the fully mature red blood cells needed to carry oxygen to all parts of the body. Murphy's professional persistence following the discovery led to the simple, effective, and inexpensive treatment of the disease by intramuscular injection of a highly-concentrated liver extract.

Murphy shared the Nobel Prize with George Hoyt Whipple, who had observed that a diet of liver, kidney, meat, and vegetables had a regenerative effect on the blood of dogs in which he had induced anemia; and George Richards Minot, who, building on Whipple's research, isolated liver as the effective dietary factor. Murphy and Minot collaborated on the highly successful study in which pernicious anemia patients were fed one-quarter to one-half pound of liver daily. Reputed for his diligence and dedication, Murphy assumed the painstaking, time-consuming responsibility of counting the microscopic reticulocytes (red blood cells) in the blood samples of pernicious anemia patients before and during the liver diet. The dramatic increase in reticulocytes in the samples following the patient's consumption of liver clearly identified the critical connection between liver ingestion and the production of mature red blood cells.

William Parry Murphy was born on February 6, 1892, in Stoughton, Wisconsin, to Congregational minister Thomas Francis Murphy and his wife, Rose Anna Parry. He attended public schools in Wisconsin and Oregon and received his B.A. in 1914 from the University of Oregon. Murphy taught high school math and physics for two years in Oregon before entering the University of Oregon Medical School in Portland, where he also worked in the anatomy department as a laboratory assistant. In 1918, he took a summer course at Rush Medical School in Chicago. He later received the William Stanislaus Murphy Fellowship award and entered Harvard Medical School in Boston, from which he graduated in 1922. He interned at Rhode Island Hospital, Providence, then returned to Boston to become an assistant resident physician at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital.

In 1925, Minot had put pernicious anemia patients at Boston's Huntington Memorial Hospital on a liver-rich diet and observed their improvement. Wanting more evidence, he told no one of his experiment, not even the resident from Boston's Peter Bent Brigham Hospital whose collaboration he recruited. Minot was an attending physician at Brigham where Murphy, a hard-working resident with a keen interest in blood disorders, attracted his attention. Without saying why, Minot asked Murphy to feed liver to pernicious anemia patients at Brigham. Murphy followed Minot's instructions, and two independent surveys were underway at two different institutions.

Eventually, Murphy and Minot enlisted the expertise of Edwin J. Cohn, a physical chemistry professor at Harvard Medical School. Cohn chemically reduced large amounts of liver to a concentrated extract fifty to one hundred times more potent than the liver itself. Murray subsequently sought the help of Guy W. Clark of the Lederle Laboratories; soon they developed an extremely concentrated extract. Injected into the muscle only once a month, the extract provided the same therapeutic effect as the liver diet or the oral extract at a much lower cost to patients.

Murphy's lifesaving contribution to medicine was further advanced by Harvard physician William Castle, who, in 1948, isolated the active ingredient in liver which promoted the development of fully mature red blood cells in patients suffering from pernicious anemia. That factor, named cyanocobalamin for its high concentration of cobalt, is commonly called Vitamin B₁₂₁₂, which is now used universally via intramuscular injection for the lifesaving treatment of pernicious anemia.

In addition to working with Minot on the liver diet study, Murphy became Minot's partner in private practice in Boston. In 1924, he was appointed assistant in medicine at Harvard Medical School, promoted to associate in medicine at the Brigham Hospital in 1935, and became a senior associate in medicine and consultant in hematology there. Harvard and Brigham both granted him emeritus status in 1958, when he retired to a suburb of Boston. Murphy married in 1919, and he and his wife had two children. Murphy's honors include the Cameron Prize and Lectureship of the University of Edinburgh, the Bronze Medal of the American Medical Association, and the Gold Medal of the Massachusetts Humane Society. He died on October 9, 1987, in Brookline, Massachusetts.