: Health Hinge

Paul Zamecnik was born in Cleveland, Ohio. He attend Dartmouth College, majored in chemistry and zoology, and received his AB degree in 1933. He then attended Harvard Medical School and received his MD degree in 1936. Between 1936 and 1939, he worked at Collis P. Huntington Memorial Hospital in Boston, Harvard Medical School, and Lakeside Hospital in Cleveland.[1]

During his Lakeside Hospital internship, Zamecnik became interested in how cells regulate growth, and hence, in protein chemistry. He was awarded a Finney-Howell Fellowship and a Moseley Traveling Fellowship to go to the Carlsberg Laboratory in Copenhagen where he worked with Dr. Kai Linderstrom-Lang. His planned time in Copenhagen was cut short because of World War II—the Germans occupied Denmark from April 1940—and he and his wife, Mary Connor, returned to Boston where he became an Assistant Physician at the Huntington Memorial Hospital, studying the toxic factors involved in traumatic shock for a wartime Office of Scientific Research and Development project led by Huntington director Joseph Aub. After a year in New York at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research studying protein synthesis with Max Bergmann, he returned to Harvard in 1942 to join the Faculty of Medicine at Harvard Medical School where he became Instructor and then Professor of Medicine.[2]

Paul Zamecnik is generally regarded as the founder of antisense therapy[3].

Zamecnik has authored or co-authored 210 peer-reviewed scientific articles. He has won many distinguished awards, including the National Cancer Society National Award in 1968, National Medal of Science in 1991, and the first-ever Lasker Lifetime Achievement Award in 1996. Zamecnik is also a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, American Society of Biological Chemistry, American Association for Cancer Research (President 1965-66), Association of American Physicians, Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters and the American Philosophical Society. Zamecnik married Mary Connor in 1936 (deceased 2005), and together they had 3 children.

Paul Charles Zamecnik (1912- ) is an American scientist, Professor of Medicine Emeritus, Harvard Medical School and Senior Scientist, Massachusetts General Hospital, who played a central role in the early history of molecular biology. Zamecnik pioneered the in vitro synthesis of proteins and helped elucidate the way cells generate proteins, and with Mahlon Hoagland, co-discovered transfer RNA (tRNA). Through his later work, he is credited as the inventor of antisense therapeutics. Throughout his career, Zamecnik earned over a dozen US patents for his therapeutic techniques. He still maintains a lab at MGH where he presently studies the application of synthetic oligonucleotides (antisense hybrids) for chemotherapeutic treatment of drug resistant and XDR tuberculosis.

Practical Treatise on Ventilation (1846)
The Reality and Certainty of Medicine: An address delivered at the annual meeting of the Massachusetts Medical Society, June 17, 1863 (1863)
Progress in School Discipline: Corporal Punishment in the Public Schools (1867)
Autumnal Catarrh (1872)
The Early History of the McLean Asylum for the Insane: A criticism of the report of the Massachusetts State Board of Health for 1877 (1877)
Memoir of Daniel Treadwell (1887)

Morrill Wyman married Elizabeth Aspinwall Pulsifer, the orphan daughter of a ship’s captain, and they had four children. He was greatly saddened by the death of his brother Jeffries in 1872. His son Morrill Wyman Jr. wrote a short book on the lives of his father and grandfather; it was published privately not long before his own death in 1913.

Morrill Wyman also served as president of “Cambridge Hospital” (now Mount Auburn Hospital) during the construction of its first building; a building at the hospital now bears his name. After formally closing his practice in 1892 (although he continued to see devoted patients for many years after that), Wyman wrote an article and later a book on the life of Daniel Treadwell, inventor and Harvard professor, who had been a friend of Wyman’s. During his long career as a physician, he treated many prominent patients, including Theodore Roosevelt[1], Charles Eliot[2], and Louis Agassiz. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

The whipping of a 16-year-old girl named Josephine Foster in a Cambridge school in 1866 gave Wyman a new cause. Convinced that it was harmful to use corporal punishment on young women and girls, Wyman led a petition drive, spoke and wrote on the subject, and ultimately served terms on the Cambridge School Board. He soon allied with others such as Bostonian John P. Ordway who wished to ban corporal punishment in the public schools for both sexes. Wyman testified at a hearing in 1868 on a bill to abolish all corporal punishment in public schools in Massachusetts - a bill which passed the lower house of the General Court, but failed in the Senate. (Corporal punishment in public schools was ultimately prohibited by law in Massachusetts in 1972.) His efforts did not lead to a long-standing ban on corporal punishment in Cambridge schools, but increased public awareness of it, and new reporting requirements probably reduced it considerably.

Early in his career Wyman became interested in ventilation, and became an expert on the ventilation of sickrooms and public buildings. A paper on the subject won an award from the Massachusetts Medical Society, and he published a book on the subject in 1846. He also devised a method and device for removing excess fluid from the chest cavity (1850). During the Civil War he served on a Sanitary Committee that inspected army medical facilities, being considered too old and too busy of a doctor to send to the front lines. After the Civil War Wyman became interested in hay fever, which he and members of his family suffered from, and he conducted experiments that convinced him that ragweed was a cause of what he called “Autumnal Cattarh”; gathering data from correspondents, he published the first pollen maps of the United States so that sufferers could plan vacations in low pollen areas.

Wyman lectured on medical subjects for many years, both at a private medical school which he and his brother Jeffries conducted in Boston and at Harvard, where he served as interim professor of anatomy 1853-1856. He took a special interest in the Harvard Medical School during his terms as a Harvard overseer (1875-1887).

Morrill Wyman (July 25, 1812 in Chelmsford, Massachusetts – January 30, 1903 in Cambridge, Massachusetts) was an American physician and social reformer . Best known today for his work on hay fever, he was one of the most respected doctors of his time, a social reformer, Harvard overseer, hospital president, and author in his long lifetime.

Wyman was the son of Dr. Rufus Wyman, first director of the McLean Asylum, and Elizabeth Morrill. He and his brother Jeffries Wyman (later first curator of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard) graduated from Harvard in 1833 and received medical degrees in 1837. Soon thereafter he set up a medical practice in Cambridge which he continued for over 50 years.

Wyman was married in 1850 to Adeline Wheelwright, with whom he had two daughters, Mary and Susan. Wheelwright died in 1855 and in 1861, he married Annie Williams Whitney, with whom he had a son, Jeffries Wyman, Jr. Whitney died in 1864, the year of their son’s birth.[5] In 1978, the Peabody Museum published Dear Jeffie, a charming collection of letters and sketches that Wyman had written to his son from 1866 to 1874 (the year of his own death) when he was doing field work in the states and abroad. His brother Dr. Morrill Wyman was a respected Cambridge doctor; their father Dr. Rufus Wyman was the first director of the McLean Asylum. Ironically, Dr. George Parkman had sought the directorship of the asylum, another connection between Parkman and the Wymans.[6]

Wyman was a theist who attended the Unitarian Church at Harvard and as such leaned toward a belief in a “theistic, morphological form of evolution rather than natural selection.”[3] Nonetheless, in 1860, Charles Darwin sought him out for support of his theory due to Wyman’s work on apes and anatomy.[4]