Your Letters

FALL 2020

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES DIVISION

Confronting SARS-CoV-2

Researchers, clinicians and trainees meet the unprecedented challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic

Medicine on the Midway is open for feedback

Medicine on the Midway is introducing a new section —Your Letters. The section will include letters from readers about the magazine’s content or reflections about their UChicago training. Letters being considered for publication must be signed and may be edited for AP style, space, clarity and civility. To provide a range of views and voices, we encourage letter writers to limit themselves to 300 words or fewer. While the staff works remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic, please send letters via email: momedit@ uchospitals.edu.

Of colds and coronaviruses

I am writing to thank you for the excellent Fall 2020 issue of Medicine on the Midway, which I enjoyed reading.

I have some memories about the coronavirus discovery sidebar on page 23.

During the October 1959 entering class orientation for the medical school Class of 1963, we were informed about Dr. Dorothy Hamre’s upper respiratory infection research project and encouraged to volunteer. As an incentive we were told that a volunteer would receive $1 each time one presented with early symptoms of a URI. Although altruism might have sufficed, I believe some of my classmates did (on occasion) rely on the reward and perhaps used it to relieve their symptoms by self-medicating at the University Tap (on 55th Street and Ellis Avenue, but closed sometime in the early 1960s) or the more distant Jimmy’s.

In the summer quarter of 1960, I worked as a lab technician in Dorothy Hamre’s virology lab. It was a small lab with two full-time technicians, one or two graduate students, and two summer medical student technicians. Besides the lab staff, Drs. John Procknow, Marc Beem and the medical residents on the infectious disease service would drop in frequently. The atmosphere was informal, but I remember the quality of the work done as rigorous. Charles Schlossman, SB’59, MD’63

As a medical student and PhD candidate in virology from 1963 to 1969 I was a participant in the respiratory virus/common cold study conducted by Dorothy Hamre in the ’60s where the now infamous “coronavirus” was first isolated. I read the piece in the Fall 2020 issue of Medicine on the Midway about the discovery of coronaviruses at the University of Chicago as a cause of URIs in medical students. One of the journals where the first description of the coronavirus family responsible for the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic was cited, but the article in Medicine on the Midway never mentioned Dorothy Hamre as the lead researcher conducting this study. This was a serious oversight on the part of the editors of a magazine designed to report news about and for alumni of the University of Chicago. As a virology graduate student during that time I do remember informal seminars organized by Marc Beem, Professor of Pediatrics, held in our 6th floor conference room in Wyler in which we discussed Dr. Hamre’s findings. I remember going for periodic nose swabbing and blood draws as a study participant. I may have even been one of those students from whom the first coronavirus was isolated when I went to provide a sample from an ordinary cold. Robert L. Wollmann, PhD’68, MD’69

Nuclear medicine memories

The article on Paul Harper, MD, and Katherine Lathrop in the Fall 2020 Medicine on the Midway brought back many memories. I remember the day in August 1961 that our first Mo-99 “cow” was delivered from Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Paul asked me to “read the instructions and go play with it.” Paul and Katherine, you might say, threw me in the deep end and I learned how to swim. I won the Chicago Surgical Society prize for my Tc99m research in 1962. In that same year we also began the first work on gallium and indium. The new isotopes were coming so fast that my wife put a sign in our ACRH basement laboratory—“The Isotope of the Month”—and it changed frequently!

We wrote the first papers on Tc99m and I spent the next many years writing about it including the leader in The Lancet in 1967: “Tc99m—a versatile isotope.” I did the original animal and human dosimetry for our laboratory and human clinical investigations. There was also one in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism on the thyroid in 1967 or 1968. I “dined on pertechnetate” for a decade. With that work as a foundation, I went on to the NIH-NCI Biophysics Laboratory from 1962 to 1965. Somehow, the next step was general and vascular surgery at the Massachusetts General Hospital, but that is another story.

It was quite a year.

George Andros, MD’60