science · 31 March 1907 · 117 years ago
birth
Born 31 Mar 1907; died 28 Aug 1996 at age 89.
American microbiologist who researched arthropod-borne viral diseases such as rabies and encephalitis. While working for the Rockefeller foundation, Johnson isolated a strain of virus from the spinal chord of a 14-year-old girl that died from rabies, introduced the virus to the brain of young chicks, transferred from one chick to another 138 times. In 1945, he gave a sample of this Flury virus (named after the girl) to Dr Hilary Koprowski who spent another ten years developing from it a new vaccine eventually used for dogs in the 1960's. In later work, Johnson took an ecological approach to understanding diseases transmitted by animals and travelled extensively to track down the natural foci of disease agents in wildlife.
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