John Savory

[摘要] John Savory was born on an early spring day in 1936, in an upstairs bedroom in his parents' house, in a tiny village in the Rossendale Valley in the northwest of England. Damp and misty, even by British standards, the valley's steep hills and stone-fenced fields had been transformed, during the early 19th century, into a backdrop for the burgeoning textile industry—the wet climate kept the cotton fibers, imported largely from the American South, from breaking. During the American Civil War, those cotton supplies were cut off, leaving many out of work. The upstairs bedroom where Savory was born served as a soup kitchen during those lean years.That room, with its unlikely link to America, was a fitting place for Savory to make his entry. Obsessed with cricket and other typically British pursuits as a boy, and educated in the ancient cathedral city of Durham at a time when students still wore gowns to classes, Savory would play out the vaster drama of his life on American soil. In 1961, only weeks after receiving his PhD in organic chemistry, he arrived in Jacksonville, Florida, for a two-year fellowship. He stayed and, after a brief stint in industry, embarked on a training program in clinical chemistry at the University of Washington in Seattle.It was a radical moment in clinical chemistry. Electrophoresis, radioimmunoassay, and other new disease-detecting methods had recently been invented. Automated instruments, such as the centrifugal analyzer, promised to take the time and drudgery out of lab work. Yet it was not yet clear how to implement or even arrange the new-fangled machines in the lab.Over the next few years, Savory, who is emeritus professor and director of clinical chemistry, toxicology, and core laboratories at the University of Virginia, helped to spearhead a kind of industrial revolution …

[学科分类] 过敏症与临床免疫学