Dr. South’s Research Improved Lives

Edited from a story by Rick Nathanson/Albuquerque Journal

She will long be known as the woman who cared for “the boy in the bubble.” But history will also remember her as an accomplished medical school professor and physician who achieved major breakthroughs in the treatment of babies’ immunological systems.

Dr. Mary Ann South (BA 55) died in her Portales home at 86 on Nov. 7. A graduate and class valdecitorian of Portales High School class of 1951, South graduated with honors from ENMU, then attended Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, recieving an M.D. in pediatrics in 1959.

But she is best known as a member of the team of doctors who cared for David Vetter, known as “the boy in the bubble” because of the protective plastic domes in which he lived his entire life.

South was long recognized for her expertise in pediatrics, infectious diseases, and pediatric and adult immunology.

During her career, she was involved in major breakthroughs involving how the rubella virus in babies causes immune defects and the differentiation of immune cells, as well as other groundbreaking research.

South was among the doctors treating Vetter, who was born in 1971 with severe combined immunodeficiency, or SCID. During his first years of life, he lived mostly at Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston.

Later, he spent more time at home with his parents and older sister in Dobbin, Texas. Even there, he existed in interconnected plastic containment bubbles and could only be touched by special gloves protruding into the walls of his bubble. Vetter died in 1984, at the age of 12.

In a 2000 interview in the Portales News-Tribune, South said, “I got really attached to David’s family and to David. He was a cheery baby. He had a sunny personality ... just a happy little kid.”

Although South had moved on to other professional positions, she remained close to the boy and his family and was present at the time of his death.

“Cultures of his cells were preserved after his death and the molecular defect was discovered using his cells and those of two other boys with the disease,” South told the newspaper. “Now we have the possibility to do genetic engineering to correct the defect.”

As a result of her early work as well as the work of her colleagues, the overwhelming majority of infants diagnosed with SCID are now successfully treated with bone marrow transplants.

It was during her time as an assistant professor at Baylor College of Medicine that South came to know and help care for Vetter.

Other professional positions took South to Pennsylvania, where she was the director of pediatric immunology at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and professor at the University of Pennsylvania; then to Lubbock, where she worked in the Department of Pediatrics at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center; then as a visiting professor with the National Institutes of Health. She then served as the Kellogg Endowed Professor of Medicine at Meharry Medical College in Nashville, Tennessee, one of the few historically black medical schools in the country.