$250,000 for Virus Study
ANOTHER grant from the National In. stitutes of Health, this one on a different basis, was perhaps the largest single research grant ever received by an individual investigator at the Medical School.
The grant of $250,000 was made to Dr. Lawrence Kilham, virologist, and is for a seven-year study of latent viruses and their relationship to cancer and Mongolism.
Dr. Kilham, who came to Dartmouth last year from the National Institutes of Health, said the studies would center on latent viruses in rats as they may relate to cancer in these animals. Since most viruses that infect humans have close relatives in animals, the findings could provide knowledge of human cancer and ways to attack it. In the past five years medical scientists have learned much about the causes of cancer in humans from studying virus-cancer relationships in animals.
Viruses are submicroscopic parasites and in their latent form may live through the entire life of their animal hosts without bothering them. They are held in check by resistance developed by the host, but may become virulent when picked up by another species that lacks this immunity or even in members of the host species if their natural resistance is broken down.
Dr. Kilham isolated two previously unknown latent viruses, rat virus and K-virus, while at the National Institutes of Health. His experiments with rat virus showed that it was harmless to most rats, but when injected into young hamsters it produced a dwarfism much like human Mongolism.
Human Mongolism affects about 2.9 of every hundred births in women over 40. What can be learned in hamsters might also provide insight into the disease process underlying human Mongolism. Dr. Kilham said.
"We are trying to move forward on broad front over a relatively long period," he explained. "We expect that more questions and research opportunities will develop as we proceed."
Dr. Kilham had been with the NIH from 1949 to 1961, except for single years spent in research at the Virus Research Institute of East Africa and the Rocky Mountain Laboratory at Hamilton, Mont. A native of Brookline, Mass., he was graduated from Harvard in 1932 after majoring in history and literature. He earned his Master's degree in biology there in 1935 and a doctor of medicine degree in 1940.
