Abstract
DR. JOHN D. FERRY, assistant professor of chemistry in the University of Wisconsin, who developed valuable surgical products from blood plasma during the War, has been given the Eli Lilly and Company Prize of 1000 dollars awarded by the American Chem al Society for “versatile and incisive studies on the chemistry, especially the physical chemistry, of large molecules”. Besides doing war-time research on blood plasma in the Department of Physical Chemistry at the Harvard Medical School, Dr. Ferry served on a special advisory panel of the Army Quartermaster Corps on the preparation and use of plastics and films from high polymers. Dr. Ferry was born at Dawson, British Columbia, on May 4, 1912, and graduated from Stanford University; during 1932–34 he worked at the National Institute for Medical Research in London. His early work was upon the size of viruses as estimated by their passage through membranes. Studies of polyisobutylene and polystyrene and of rubber followed, leading to an interest into the properties of large protein molecules and of the mechanical properties of their gels. A photo-elastic method for the study of elasticity and rigidity of gels over a wide range of frequencies has contributed greatly to our understanding on one hand of such systems as polystyrene-xylene; on the other, of the gelation of gelatin and the clotting of blood. His knowledge of proteins in the solid state has led during the War to the production, from the proteins concerned with the natural clotting process, of fibrinogen plastic and fibrin tubes and films. Fibrin film has found acceptance in neuro-surgery as a dural substitute and is now being applied to other surgical uses. Prepared entirely from fractions of human plasma, these products approach those that occur in Nature in their physical properties, in that they do not lead to foreign body reactions, and in their ultimate fate in the body.
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Eli Lilly and Company Prize. Nature 158, 372 (1946). https://doi.org/10.1038/158372a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/158372a0