William Henry Howell
1860-1945 · Amerikaner · Biochemie
Amerikanischer Physiologe an Johns Hopkins, dessen Labor für die Isolierung von Heparin im Jahr 1916 und die anschließende Charakterisierung seiner gerinnungshemmenden Wirkung verantwortlich war und damit die moderne Ära der Antikoagulanzien-Pharmakologie eröffnete, in welche das molekulare Erbe von Hirudin (Haycraft, 1884) letztlich eingeordnet wurde.
Profil
- Lebensjahre
- 1860-1945
- Nationalität
- American
- Epoche
- Frühes 20. Jahrhundert
- Hauptfachgebiet
- Biochemie
Institutionelle Zugehörigkeiten
- Johns Hopkins University (B.A., 1881; Ph.D. in Biology, 1884)
- Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine (Professor of Physiology, 1893-1931; Dean, 1899-1911)
- Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health (founding co-Director with William H. Welch)
- National Academy of Sciences (member)
Wichtige Beiträge
- Served as Professor of Physiology and later Dean at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine (1893-1931), establishing one of the foremost American physiology laboratories of the early twentieth century.
- Directed the Johns Hopkins laboratory in which the second-year medical student Jay McLean, in 1916, identified the anticoagulant activity of a liver phospholipid preparation that Howell subsequently named heparin (1918).
- Continued the systematic characterization of heparin's anticoagulant action across the 1920s and 1930s, providing the laboratory groundwork for the eventual clinical development of heparin as a parenteral anticoagulant in the late 1930s and 1940s.
- Authored A Text-book of Physiology, a standard American medical-physiology reference across multiple editions in the early twentieth century, transmitting the emerging laboratory understanding of coagulation to a generation of American medical students.
- Established, through the Hopkins physiology laboratory, a sustained American scientific tradition of coagulation research that, by the late twentieth century, would converge with the molecular characterization of leech-derived anticoagulants (hirudin, antistasin) in a unified anticoagulant-pharmacology field.
Bedeutung für die Hirudotherapie
William Henry Howell's contribution to hirudotherapy is the parallel-historical role his laboratory played in opening the modern anticoagulant-pharmacology era within which the molecular legacy of leech-derived anticoagulants — and ultimately of hirudotherapy more broadly — would be ultimately situated. The 1884 isolation of hirudin from medicinal leech salivary glands by John Berry Haycraft at Edinburgh inaugurated the molecular era of hirudotherapy research. Thirty-two years later, in 1916, the medical student Jay McLean working under Howell's direction at Johns Hopkins isolated a second naturally-occurring anticoagulant principle — heparin — from mammalian liver. The parallel between Haycraft's leech-derived anticoagulant and Howell's mammalian-derived anticoagulant established the conceptual frame within which the field of anticoagulant pharmacology developed across the twentieth century. Howell's laboratory characterization of heparin across the 1920s and 1930s — including the 1925 American Journal of Physiology paper that established heparin as a defined biochemical anticoagulant principle — provided the experimental groundwork for the eventual late-1930s and 1940s clinical introduction of parenteral heparin as the first widely-used pharmaceutical anticoagulant. The clinical heparin era subsequently shaped the conceptual environment in which the late-twentieth-century pharmaceutical development of recombinant hirudin (lepirudin, desirudin) and of synthetic direct thrombin inhibitors (bivalirudin, argatroban, dabigatran) could be rationally pursued as alternatives or complements to heparin. The American Society of Hirudotherapy regards William Henry Howell as a foundational figure of the modern anticoagulant-pharmacology era within which the molecular legacy of hirudin is situated, and as the laboratory-historical counterpart to John Berry Haycraft's 1884 Edinburgh work. Howell's role within hirudotherapy is contextual rather than direct: he did not himself work on leech-derived anticoagulants, but the laboratory environment and pharmacological framework his work established made possible the eventual integration of hirudin-derived therapeutics into contemporary anticoagulant medicine.
Wichtige Publikationen
- A Text-book of Physiology, for Medical Students and Physicians · Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders Company (multiple editions through 1940s) (1905)
- Two New Factors in Blood Coagulation — Heparin and Pro-Antithrombin · American Journal of Physiology (1918)
- Heparin, an Anticoagulant · American Journal of Physiology (1925)
Externe Ressourcen
Beeinflusste Forschung
Verbindungen und Forschungsbereiche, die auf die Beiträge dieser Persönlichkeit zurückgehen:
Verwandte Persönlichkeiten
John Berry Haycraft
1857-1922 · Brite (Schotte)
Edinburgh-Physiologe, der 1884 Hirudin entdeckte und die moderne Molekularpharmakologie des Blutegelspeichels begründete.
Karl Jacoby
1864-1926 · Deutscher
Deutscher Pharmakologe, der 1902 das erste rohe Hirudinpulver herstellte und damit Haycrafts Entdeckung mit der Antikoagulanzien-Chemie im industriellen Maßstab verband.
Marie Termier
1859-1930 · Franzose
Französische Ärztin, die 1922 eine der ersten formalen klinischen Studien zur Blutegeltherapie bei postoperativer Thrombose veröffentlichte und damit die moderne klinische Methodik in der Hirudotherapie etablierte.
Isabella P. Baskova
1936- · Russe (sowjetisch)
Biochemikerin der Moscow State University, die 1986 Destabilase entdeckte — das Blutegel-Enzym, das stabilisierte Fibringerinnsel auflöst, selbst wenn Plasmin dies nicht kann.