Howard L. Bachrach received the National Medal of Science for his research from President Reagan in 1983.
Howard L. Bachrach, 88, pioneer of engineered vaccines
Howard L. Bachrach received the National Medal of Science for his research from President Reagan in 1983.
LOS ANGELES - Virologist Howard L. Bachrach, who purified the polio and foot-and-mouth disease viruses and was the first to use genetic engineering to produce a vaccine, died June 26 in Atlantis, Fla. He was 88 and had been suffering from heart disease, said his daughter, Eve Bachrach.
His work on purification of the polio virus made possible the development of the first vaccine against the disease by Jonas Salk, said virologist George Vande Woude, director of the Van Andel Research Institute in Grand Rapids, Mich.
Isolation of the foot-and-mouth virus could have also led to a whole-virus vaccine, Vande Woude said, but the federal government chose not to pursue it at the time.
The United States had several devastating outbreaks of foot-and-mouth disease early in the 20th century, the last one in 1929, before the virus was eradicated here.
After World War II, however, the disease reappeared in Mexico and was spreading rapidly. The US Department of Agriculture began a crash program to find ways to protect the US livestock industry against its reappearance.
One of its actions was to send Dr. Bachrach, newly graduated with a doctorate in biochemistry from the University of Minnesota, to Europe to spend a year in the agency's European Commission on Foot-and-Mouth Disease laboratories.
Working there, in 1950, he isolated and purified the virus that causes the disease.
Returning to the states that year, he accepted an appointment at the University of California's Virus Laboratory in Berkeley, where he worked with Nobel laureate Wendell Meredith Stanley.
At that time, researchers were attempting to isolate the polio virus. The polio virus is a picornavirus, like the foot-and-mouth disease virus, and Dr. Bachrach was able to apply the knowledge he had gained working on the latter virus to the new problem.
Until then, the purest sample of polio available was only 1 percent virus and 99 percent "gunk," from the cells used to grow it.
Dr. Bachrach and virologist Carleton E. Schwerdt grew the Type II or Lansing strain of the virus in the nerve tissues of rats and got the concentration up to about 10 percent. They isolated two types of particles, one about a millionth of an inch wide and a second less than half that size. Injecting the particles into rats, they demonstrated that the larger particles were the virus.
Dr. Bachrach also used the electron microscope at Berkeley to take the first pictures of the virus.
The purification procedures developed by Dr. Bachrach and Schwerdt were used by other researchers to produce large mounts of virus for study and to produce vaccines that were free of side effects caused by contaminants.
In 1953, Dr. Bachrach was offered an appointment to USDA's Plum Island Animal Disease Research Center in Greenport, N.Y., where he spent the rest of his career.
One of his key discoveries there was that proteins from the surface of the foot-and-mouth disease virus, known as capsids, could produce an immune response in humans and animals, even though the capsids are not infectious and do not produce disease.
Working with researchers from
For that work and other research, he was awarded the National Medal of Science in 1983.
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