Re: Important Obituary: Robin Coombs; of the Coombs test for RH antibodies
From: art fougner, md (evsono@pipeline.com)
Mon Mar 6 09:33:40 2006
Thank you for sharing, Dean.
Art
At Mon, 6 Mar 2006, Dean Huffman . wrote:
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>Robin Coombs; of the Coombs test for RH antibodies
>
>Very important scientist. Great obit by the wonderful Caroline Richmond.
>
>The Independent 06 March 2006 Robert Royston Amos Coombs, immunologist: born
>London 9 January 1921; Stringer Fellow, King's College, Cambridge 1947-56;
>Fellow, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge 1962-2006; Reader in Immunology,
>Cambridge University 1963-66, Quick Professor in Immunology, 1966-88
>(Emeritus); FRS 1965; married 1952 Anne Blomfield (one son, one daughter); died
>Cambridge 25 February 2006.
>
>In 1945 Robin Coombs devised a test for detecting rhesus antibodies in pregnant
>women, and in the newborn babies of rhesus negative women. These babies used to
>die, and rhesus negative women often had a succession of pregnancies that ended
>in stillbirth or death in infancy. Coombs's test, which is now used throughout
>the world, enables recognition and treatment of the condition. Within a few
>years of the test's introduction, rhesus negative women could be assured that
>the outcome of their pregnancy was as good as that of rhesus positive women.
>The Coombs tst is also routinely used to test blood for transfusion.
>
>Coombs had previously devised a test for glanders, a serious disease of horses
>and donkeys, while a postgraduate student in the government veterinary research
>centre in Weybridge, and the work formed part of his PhD thesis. Shortly
>afterwards he went as a PhD student to Cambridge University's pathology
>department, where two senior colleagues, Robert Race and Arthur Mourant, were
>working on the recently discovered rhesus blood group system.
>
>They faced the problem that rhesus antibodies are structurally incomplete and
>therefore do not make red blood cells clump together, as a complete antigen
>would. One day, while returning home from London on the train, Coombs realised
>that, although the red blood cells did not go into clumps, they would
>nevertheless become coated with immunoglobulin, which would remain on them when
>the incomplete antibodies were washed off them.
>
>He realised that, if further antibodies were added, that recognised the
>globulins that were coating the red cells, these would then clump. They did,
>and the test proved spectacularly successful. Coombs and his two co-workers
>published their results in The Lancet in 1945, followed by a more detailed
>report in the British Journal of Experimental Pathology.
>
>Coombs wrote, with his colleague Philip Gell, the definitive textbook, Clinical
>Aspects of Immunology (1963), which ran to five editions over 30 years. They
>devised a rational, science-based classification of hypersensitivity reactions
>(published in full in the third edition, 1975), which is named after them. This
>differentiated between the immediate allergic reactions that release histamine;
>antibody-dependent reactions, which are an immune response to another protein
>in the body; immune-complex reactions, which underpin rheumatoid arthritis and
>many other diseases; and cell-mediated (rather than antibody-mediated)
>reactions, which include early-onset diabetes and transplant rejection.
>
>Robin Coombs was born in London and brought up in Cape Town. He trained as a vet
>at the Royal ("Dick") Veterinary College in Glasgow, qualifying in 1945. He
>spent a few months at the Weybridge laboratory, working on glanders, which was
>regarded as a potential biological warfare agent and kills horses and donkeys
>in the Third World, before going to Cambridge, where he spent the rest of his
>life, retiring as Emeritus Professor of Immunology.
>
>He had a remarkable capacity to visualise how antibodies and antibodies react,
>and saw them in what can only be described as cartoon form. This enabled him to
>create numerous variants in the antiglobulin reaction, so that it could detect
>antigens as well antibodies. He developed methods of coating red cells with
>specific antibodies as a way of testing for viruses and other infectious agents
>- so providing a fast, cheap and sensitive way of testing for infections at the
>patient's bedside.
>
>Coombs was a central figure in an international renaissance of immunology. It
>was poorly understood when he entered the field, and by the end of the last
>century was no longer a mystery. In the mid-1950s he and others set up the
>British Society of Immunology. He attracted the best PhD students and many of
>the world's leading immunologists trained under him, or under immunologists
>that he trained. His first PhD student, Anne Blomfeld, became his wife and
>collaborator.
>
>Boffin-like, brilliant and benign, Coombs was elected a Fellow of the Royal
>Society in 1965 and received many honours and awards, including honorary
>fellowship of the Royal College of Physicians, a rare honour for a non-medical
>person. He published over 200 hundred scientific papers. With his wife and D.G.
>Ingram, he was the author of The Serology of Conglutination, and Its Relation to
>Disease (1961).
>
>When Coombs retired, he developed his own theory of cot death, that it was
>caused by an acute allergic response to inhaling regurgitated cow's milk when
>infants are laid to sleep face down, which he published as Sudden Infant Death
>Syndrome: could a healthy infant succumb to inhalation-anaphylaxis during sleep
>leading to cot death? (with W.E. Parish and A.F. Walls, 2000). He tested his
>theory on guinea pigs, lightly anaesthetising them to simulate sleep.
>
>- - - -
>
>For anybody who is interested, see also the obituary for Vincent Freda
>(developed RhoGam). Copy available on request.
--
art fougner, md
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