Rockefeller bacteriologist wins Dart/NYU Award

Emil C. Gotschlich, head of Rockefeller University’s Laboratory of Bacterial Pathogenesis, is one of three winners of this year’s Dart/NYU Biotechnology Achievement Awards. Administered by the Biotechnology Study Center of New York University School of Medicine, the Dart/NYU Awards recognize the role of pure science in the development of pharmaceuticals and honor those scientists whose work has led to major advances in patient care. Dr. Gotschlich, the NYU Alumnus Achievement awardee, will be honored at an awards symposium at NYU on March 31.

Dr. Gotschlich, who is R. Gwin Follis-Chevron Professor Emeritus at Rockefeller, studies a group of bacteria responsible for diseases including meningitis, gonorrhea and streptococcal infection. From 1966 to 1968, while serving as a captain in the Medical Corps at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, Dr. Gotschlich and his colleagues developed a purified polysaccharide vaccine against Group C meningitis, the strain that was a chronic problem at American military recruit camps. The vaccine was approved for use with all recruits in 1970 and since then the disease has virtually disappeared from military bases. Dr. Gotschlich also helped developed a vaccine against Group A meningitis that proved more than 90 percent effective in controlled trials during epidemics in Egypt, Sudan and Finland.

The two vaccines were the first to be standardized solely on their physical and chemical properties, and earned Dr. Gotschlich the 1978 Albert Lasker Award for Clinical Medical Research. Dr. Gotschlich went on to conduct pioneering studies on the pathogenicity of streptococci and gonococci.

Dr. Gotschlich received his M.D. from New York University School of Medicine in 1959 and interned at Bellevue Hospital before joining Rockefeller University’s Laboratory of Bacteriology and Immunology in 1960, under the leadership of Maclyn McCarty and Rebecca C. Lancefield. He was appointed professor and senior physician at The Rockefeller University Hospital in 1978. From 1996 to 2005, he also served as vice president for medical sciences. Dr. Gotschlich is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and its Institute of Medicine.

The other winners of this year’s Dart/NYU awards are Arnold J. Levine, professor at the Institute for Advanced Study and former president of The Rockefeller University, for his definition of the molecular basis of tumor suppression; and Judah Folkman, Julia Dyckman Andrus Professor of Pediatric Surgery at Harvard University, for his discovery of how and why new blood vessels are formed.