COVID-19 causes a host of diverse complications, from lung inflammation to blood clots, heart failure, and brain fog. The Strickland lab believes these attributes may have a single culprit—and that findings from research on Alzheimer’s disease might give them a leg up in finding it. #RockefellerScience ... See MoreSee Less
In 1908, 113 years ago this week, Rockefeller Institute director Simon Flexner published a paper that would eventually save millions of lives. Meningococcal meningitis had killed thousands in a worldwide pandemic only a few years previously, and Flexner had since worked tirelessly to perfect an antiserum derived from infected horses. When he injected the antiserum directly into the fluid that bathes the spinal column, he observed patients recovering from a disease that, at the time, had a death rate of 75 percent. "While the number of patients treated with serum is still small yet the results on the whole indicate that it may be possible to produce serum that may have more or less beneficial influence on the course of the disease," Flexner wrote, in the Journal of the American Medical Association. "Of the forty-seven patients with meningitis treated in various places with the serum prepared by Flexner and Jobling thirty-four recovered and thirteen died. Eliminating four cases, in which the disease was either fulminant or the patient's condition so extreme that death occurred in a few hours after the injection of the serum, the death rate becomes 20.1 per cent." It was the overwhelming success of Flexner's meningitis therapy that would inspire John D. Rockefeller, Sr. to pledge funds that very year to build the Rockefeller Hospital in New York City.
Read the paper here:
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2124550/pdf/141.pdf ... See MoreSee Less
