The Western Morning News, Friday, September 18, 1953
Millions have had sufferings eased by work of Dr. J. W. Trevan
Pharmacologist from West Retires
Most scientists and generally those who have made the greatest contributions to valuable knowledge, are notoriously of the retiring type - some perhaps more so than others.
Two from the Westcountry I have particularly in mind. One is Prof. A. V. Hill, a product of Blundell's who was last year's president of the British Association.
The other is Dr John William Trevan, who is more especially in the news at the moment, for at the end of the month he retires as director of the Wellcome Research Laboratories, founded by that great benefactor, the late Sir Henry S Wellcome, the centenary of whose birth has just been celebrated.
Outside the world of science Dr Trevan is not even a name, which is no doubt as he would have it, and yet probably millions of human sufferers, especially from diabetes, are in his debt, as well as all those who keep and love domestic animals.
'Hard Pad'
Not only did he help to make insulin available to the world, but, with his colleagues, he has also much to immunise and cure farm stock of many kinds.
It will be probably due to him and one of his associates, who discovered the virus which causes "hard pad" disease, that we shall ultimately be able to apply the remedy.
This great pharmacologist, who has been working for surely 40 years to aid men, women, and animals, is a kindly, modest, bespectacled gentleman who was 66 last July. He will not boast about it, I am sure, but Dr Trevan is obviously very much the architect of his own fortunes.
He was born at Bodmin, the son of the late Mr J W S Trevan, who was a Plymouth man, but I believe his family on both sides goes fairly far into the roots of both counties of Devon and Cornwall.
Plymouth Days
I know very little about his early days, except that they were spent largely in Plymouth, where he was reared in the atmosphere of the city's prevailing nonconformity, and that he was a council school boy before he went to the technical school.
From the Westcountry he made his way to St Bartholomew's Hospital, London, and had a brilliant career there, so much so that he was retained on the staff, first as a demonstrator of physiology, and during the First World War, and for a couple of years after, with the additional duties of casualty physician, with the rank of captain in the RAMC having by this time got his MB and his BS as well as his BSc.
It was in 1920, when Dr Trevan was 33, that he began what was to prove his real life's work, by joining the great medicinal and chemical organisation created Sir Henry Wellcome, the American who came to England and established, in 1924, 12 years before he died, the Wellcome Foundation, which brought together all his various enterprises, particulary with their research laboratories.
I may add that this vast empire, which promotes and applies knowledge, is usually regarded as one in pursuit of private gain. This is not the case.
When Sir Henry, who had been such a good friend of Dr Trevan and a constant encouragement to him in his work, died in 1936, he provided under his will that all the profits of this enterprise he had created should go to the Wellcome Trust, the charity designed to further research in the medicinal and related sciences.
Thus, for more than 17 years of his professional life, Dr Trevan has, in fact, been working in the service of the world-wide community, but in fact a lot of the work which he did before then, financed by his chief, was purely of this philanthropic and humane character.
Dr Trevan practically began his professional career in the field of research, and although it is a fact that at the end of the month he retires from his important duties as director of the Foundation, and chief of all its laboratories, there is no doubt that he will still go on "researching" in some form or another to the end of his days, for he will continue to act as a consultant.
He went to Wellcomes as pharmacologist in the physical research laboratoies, when the great Sir Andrew Balfour was director, and worked consistently in that capacity under Balfour's successors until he himself took on the mantle.
No Known Method
He was engaged during the 1920's on schemes for the preparation of insulin, which had been discovered by Dr Banting, the Canadian, to relieve the victims of diabetes from that horrid diet of liver to which they were condemned if they were to keep alive.
One of the problems which then required to be solved was the determination of the amount of insulin actually present in the material prepared. Then, no chemical method was known either for the identification of insulin or measuring it - to use a technical phrase, its assay.
In other words, and to put the matter unprofessionally, insulin was there; what was required was the knowledge of how to apply it. It was out of this problem that came Dr Trevan's most important single piece of work. It is called "the determination of toxicity" which resulted when, in the absence of a chemical test, he and those who worked for him measured the effects on mice or rabbits.
New Outlook
They were beset in the first place with difficulties. They found that these individual creatures varied enormously in their reaction to insulin, and in consequence the measurement of the activity of a given sample had to be treated as a problem requiring a statistical method.
It all sounds very technical and complicated, but, in fact, when boiled down to common parlance, it just amounted to finding out how best this new element, which in some respects has been as important to human life as oxygen, anaesthetics, and more lately penicillin, could be applied.
Dr Trevan found out. What is more, the investigation and the elucidation of the whole problem brought about a new statistical outlook on this problem of measuring the activity, or results, if you care to put it that way, of many other substances.
These included, for example, vitamins and hormones, for which the action on animals was the only specific test before they could with satisfaction be administrered to humans. It was this which has given Dr Trevan his place in medical history.
Biological Assay
He has created an entirely new subject of study in medicine, which has it own special practioners and text books and which is now known everywhere under its acknowledged name of "Biological Assay."
Almost from the beginning of his associations, Dr Trevan has been concerned with the veterinary side of the work at the Laboratories, and has either assisted in or directed much of their work in this field.
Scientifically expressed, it has involved investigation into "the methods of rendering animals immune to the toxins of disease-producing bacteria," in other words finding out what the disease is, discovering the reactions, and then how to apply them.
During Dr Trevan's long services at the chief research laboratories at Beckenham, in Kent, but mostly before he became director of the entire organisation, diseases of the farm and countryside, like dysentry in lambs, "yellows" in dogs, caused by a microbe which also infects man, distemper in dogs, and enteritis in cats, have all been tackled and overcome.
Viruses Separated
Indeed, it is now claimed that what is called classical canine distemper has almost disappeared. I do not suggest that Dr Trevan himself has been responsible, but the fact remains that much of this work has been done by colleagues with whom he has co-operated as pharmacologist.
There is one other sphere, however, which, as I have already suggested, he and a colleague working together appear to have made feasible - the end of one of the most obstinate and usually fatal of the canine diseases.
Presumably in dealing with distemper generally, Dr Trevan and his associate Dr A B MacIntyre, experienced the trouble which has been caused by a virus probably deriving in a modified way from the distemper virus.
After considerable application they managed to separate the one from the other, and as I have indicated they give this modified virus the new name which we all now know as "hard pad" disease. Every veterinary surgeon and every dog owner and dog lover dreads it, but it is quite likely that the time will soon come when this also will be a thing of the past.
And now back to Dr Trevan himself. He lives, and has done for years, in the outer suburbs of South London, at Upper Norwood, near the chief research laboratories of the Foundation at Beckenham.
Music Hobby
He has long been a Fellow of the Royal Society, and years ago was president of the Therapeutic Section of the Royal Society of Medicine. He is a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians and a member of the Board of Studies in Pharmacology in the University of London.
Otherwise you rarely ever meet him in the circles of the mighty, but every Sunday you will find him in the choir of St Aubyn's Congregational Church, Upper Norwood, in which he sings bass, for music is one of his principal hobbies, and he will go on both singing and playing. As a test of his fitness, I may add that he can still do well at tennis and badminton!