Historic Philadelphia

THE WISTAR
INSTITUTE
✧
Top: Architects’ rendering of
The Wistar Institute.
Below: Wistar’s director, Dr. Milton
Greenman, invited ten of the nation’s top
anatomists to the Institute for a two-day
meeting in April 1905. It resulted in
formation of an advisory board that
declared “the principle object of the Institute
to be research.”
COURTESY OF THE WISTAR INSTITUTE ARCHIVES.
HISTORIC PHILADELPHIA
150
The Wistar Institute, established in 1892,
was the first independent medical research
facility in the United States. The Institute
today has about 350 staff members, including
130 doctoral-level scientists.
Wistar’s medical researchers have been
distinguished for more than one hundred years
for helping to save and improve the lives of
people around the world. One of their earliest
successes was breeding of the WISTARAT, the
first standardized laboratory animal. In
addition to enabling scientists at the turn of the
century to study the human nervous system,
the WISTARAT paved the way for today’s
genetic research.
The Institute also earned recognition as
young scientists from around the world
gained access to training in Wistar laboratories,
and the Wistar Press published and circulated
scientific abstracts and journals.
During World War I, for example, when many
nations were unable to publish or purchase
scientific information, Wistar sent them thousands
of dollars worth of free journals.
By the middle of the twentieth century,
Wistar scientists Leonard Hayflick, PhD, and
Paul Moorhead, PhD had developed WI-38, a
cell line of normal cells that would grow in a
test tube. WI-38 made it possible for Wistar
scientists to develop the vaccines still used
against viral diseases that include rubella
(German measles) and rabies.
Over the past twenty years, Wistar’s scientific
investigators have focused primarily on genetics
and immunology. Wistar researchers were
among the first, for example, to develop
monoclonal antibodies (MAbs), protein
molecules that detect and destroy foreign
invaders, including cancer cells. One in
particular, 17-1A, is used in Germany as a
standard approach to colon cancer. Wistar
scientists also demonstrated the alteration
associated with human lymphomas and, at the
same time, discovered a gene called bcl-2 that
has proven to be a key player in programmed cell
death. More recently, they discovered a molecule
known as human Interleukin-12 (IL-12), which
appears to have a profound impact on the body’s
immune response and may be effective in the
treatment of various cancers and infectious
agents such as HIV.
The Wistar Institute is named for Caspar
Wistar, a prominent Philadelphia physician and
chair of the Department of Anatomy
at the University of Pennsylvania School
of Medicine in the early 1800s. Wistar was
widely respected for his professional knowledge,