Medical Breakthroughs From Madison Quiz

Answer: Guenter Bloebl

Guenter Blobel was born in Nazi Germany in 1936, and survived the firebombing of Dresden. His connection with the University of Wisconsin is that he emigrated to the United States and did his graduate work there, getting his PhD from UW in 1967. Blobel won numerous prestigious awards in the field of biology and medicine. He died of cancer in 2018 at the age of 81.

Blobel won the Nobel Prize in 1999 for this work on signal peptides, strings of amino acids that basically tell proteins how to behave. Blobell gave all of the Nobel prize money towards the restoration of his hometown of Dresden.

Answer: William Campbell

William Cambell is another immigrant with ties to the UW. He was born in Ireland in 1930 and graduated from Trinity College in Dublin. He did his graduate work at the University of Wisconsin, and earned his PhD in 1957 for work on liver flukes. Cambell spent much of his career working at the Merck Institute for Therapeutic Research, where he developed the fungicide thiabdendazole, which is used to treat potato blight.

Campbell spent much of his career working on infectious diseases, and he won the Nobel in 2015 for his work on ivermectin, a drug for treating worm based diseases such as river blindness. Campbell has worked closely with the Carter Center in its efforts to eradicate river blindness in the third world. Campbell shared his Nobel with Japanese biochemist Satoshi Omura.

Answer: Joseph Erlanger

Joseph Erlanger's connection to Wisconsin is a little more tangential, as he was only on the faculty between 1906 and 1910. He did most of his significant research in Saint Louis. Erlanger was born in San Francisco. After graduating from UC-Berkeley, he was a top student at Johns Hopkins medical school.

The UW is important because it was where Erlanger met Herber Spencer Gasser, his partner in winning the Nobel Prize in 1944. Erlanger and Gasser won for their work in neurobiology. They were able to identify how neurons behaved through the use of a modified oscilloscope, a significant breakthrough in neurobiology. Erlanger died in Saint Louis in 1965 and his home was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1976.

Answer: Har Gobind Khorana

Har Gobind Khorana is another immigrant with ties to the UW. Born in India in 1922, he lived in the UK and Canada before moving to the United States. Khorana was on the faculty of the University of Wisconsin from 1960 to 1971, and that is where he did the research that led to his Nobel Prize.

Khorana won the Nobel in 1968 for his work on genetic sequencing. Khorana was one of the world's leading bio-geneticists and created the first synthesized gene in 1972. His work laid the basis for the Human Genome Project. Khorana shared the 1968 Nobel with Marshall Nirenberg (NIH) and Robert Holley (Cornell). Khorana joined the faculty of MIT in 1971, and he died in Massachusetts in November 2011.

Answer: Joshua Lederberg

Joshua Lederberg was born in New Jersey in 1925 and stayed on the east coast, graduating from Columbia and Yale. At Yale, he studied under Edward Tatum, a future Nobel Laureate. Lederberg moved to Wisconsin in 1946, and was the faculty when he did the research that led to his Nobel.

Following his Nobel, Lederberg was at Stanford University from 1958 to 1978. He left to become President of Rockefeller University in New York City. Lederberg died in February 2008. He won the Nobel for his work on genetic recombination and the organization of bacteria. His primary research focused on salmonella and E Coli bacteria. Lederberg did the first work on viral transduction, a huge breakthrough in the field of virology. Later in his career, Lederberg become an advisor to NASA and worked with Carl Sagan on exobiology.

Answer: Karl Paul Link

Karl Paul Link (1901-1978) got his doctorate at the University of Wisconsin in 1925. After some post graduate research in Europe. Link returned to Wisconsin in 1927. He was on the faculty at Wisconsin until his retirement in 1971. Bouts with tuberculosis did limit his abilities in later years.

Karl Paul Link is the only non-Nobel prize winner on the list. Link and his research team created Warfarin in 1946. Their initial research began when Wisconsin farmers reported cattle dying of hemorrhaging after eating rotting clover. They were able to isolate the chemical that eventually became Warfarin. Initially used as a pesticide, by 1954 it was shown to have therapeutic uses as a blood thinner. For several decades, Warfarin was the go-to drug as a blood thinner. In recent years, drugs such as Eliquis and Xaralto are used far more frequently, but Warfarin was still one of the most prescribed drugs of 2019, with 14 million doses. The name Warfarin comes from Wisconsin Alumni Fund, which funded Link's research.

While Link did not win the Nobel, he did win the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research in 1955 and the Albert Lasker Award for Clinical Medical Research in 1960. Many Lasker winners have gone on to be awarded the Nobel.

Answer: Erwin Neher

Erwin Neher is another immigrant with ties to the UW. He grew up in Germany, and traveled to the US on a Fulbright scholarship. He earned his Masters degree at the University of Wisconsin in 1967. He got his PhD at Yale. Neher returned to Germany. He was at the Max-Planck-Institut für Biophysikalische Chemiein in Gottingen when he made the discoveries that led to his Nobel Prize.

Neher won the Nobel for his work on the movement of ions in cells. They are difficult to track because of their small charge. Neher's breakthrough was a method of measuring the transit of ions. He shared the Nobel with Bert Sakmann, a fellow German cellular physiologist. Neher and Sakmann won several other major medical awards prior to the Nobel, including the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize in 1986.

Answer: Oliver Smithies

Oliver Smithies is another immigrant with links to the UW. Born in Halifax, England, he earned degrees in Medicine and Chemistry at Oxford before doing post-graduate work at the University of Wisconsin. Smithies was on the faculty at UW from 1960 to 1968, working in the Department of Genetics. He left for the University of North Carolina, where he was doing research well into his 80s. Smithies died in January 2017.

Smithies won his Nobel for his research on the use of embryonic stems cells in mice. This massive medical breakthrough has been central to research on diseases such as cancer and diabetes. Smithies won the Albert Lasker Award in 2001 before winning the Nobel in 2007. He shared the award with Martin Evans (Cardiff University) and Mario Capecchi (University of Utah).

Answer: Edward Tatum

Edward Tatum was a native of Colorado. He received his PhD at the University of Wisconsin in 1934. He would go on to teach at Stanford and Yale (where he taught future Nobel Laureate Josh Lederberg). Tatum died in New York in 1975. He won the Nobel in 1958 for his work with George Beadle regarding how genes control metabolism.

Their experiments involved creating mutations in bread mold by exposing it to x-rays. Their work in 1941 led to the "one gene, one enzyme" hypothesis. Tatum and Beadle effectively created the field of molecular biology.

Answer: Howard Temin

Howard Temin (1934-1994) was born in Philadelphia. He graduated from Swarthmore College and got his PhD at Cal Tech in 1959. He joined the faculty at the University of Wisconsin in 1960. During the 1960s, Temin worked on genetic oncology, trying to determine how cancer cells function. He made the revolutionary breakthrough of reverse transcription, which completely upended contemporary ideas about the nature of DNA.

Temin did his work on tumor viruses. His results were verified by David Baltimore, who was working with murine leukemia viruses. The two shared the 1975 Nobel Prize for their discovery of reverse transcription. One of the first major real world examples of reverse transcription was the HIV virus. Temin spent much of the last decade of his life working on a vaccine against AIDS. He died in Madison in February 1994 at the age of 59.