Obit watch: April 10, 2022.

Henry Patterson has passed away at the age of 92.

You probably know him better as the guy who wrote under the pseudonym “Jack Higgins”. (He had others as well, but I think that was his best known.)

“I’m not pretending I’m Charles Dickens or anything,” he said in the 2000 interview with the Belfast newspaper. “But whatever I do, whatever it is that makes up a ‘Jack Higgins’ book, it’s not like what anyone else does.”

Arthur D. Riggs, big damn hero.

He is probably best known for his role in the invention of artificial insulin. Working alongside Keiichi Itakura and Herbert Boyer, he developed a way to use recombinant DNA technology — essentially, the ability to splice together strands of DNA — to turn E. coli into microscopic factories for the production of humanized hormones.

…

Dr. Boyer and another researcher, Stanley Cohen, had already developed the basic technology behind recombinant DNA. Dr. Riggs’s insight was to see how that technology could be used to tweak bacteria to produce artificial hormones for human use.
“We chose insulin because it looked doable, and there was a need,” he told The Los Angeles Business Journal in 2021. “At the time, diabetics were being treated with cow insulin because there was no source of human insulin. And cow insulin resulted in a high rate of allergic reactions.”

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The discovery made Genentech, and Dr. Riggs, rich. But unlike many of his fellow biotech pioneers, he declined the opportunity to make even more money working in the for-profit sector; he was under contract to Genentech, but after that arrangement ended in 1984, he returned to City of Hope full time.
He lived in the same house for 50 years and rarely sat for interviews. He gave most of his money away in the form of anonymous donations to City of Hope. His beneficence, to the tune of $210 million, was finally revealed last year, when he made an additional $100 million donation to the hospital.

…

Dr. Riggs later developed the foundations for monoclonal antibodies, again using recombinant DNA technology to trick bacteria into producing proteins that mimic human antibodies. That development has led to major advances in treating cancer and other diseases.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 10th, 2022 at 4:24 pm and is filed under Books, Obits, Science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

3 Responses to “Obit watch: April 10, 2022.”

  1. Jimmy+McNulty says:
    April 10, 2022 at 8:16 pm

    Dr Riggs. We need a few statues built for this man.

    Oh, never mind. He’s white.

  2. stainles says:
    April 11, 2022 at 10:04 am

    My beloved and indulgent sister used to have a book (Doctors: The Biography of Medicine by Sherwin B. Nuland) that was profiles of various medical pioneers, from Hippocrates all the way through William Halsted and Helen Taussig. I rather liked that book: it may have even ended up on my shelves when she was culling her library.

    I feel like somebody could do a sequel to that book covering a lot of 20th century folks, like Dr. Riggs, Dr, Pinkel, and Dr. Dudrick, just to start with.

    Then there’s the history of cardiac surgery – DeBakey and Cooley have been frequently profiled, but I think there are other people who haven’t gotten as much attention.

    And there are probably some people who are equally important, but are also still alive, and won’t get recognition until they die or until someone writes their biography.

  3. RoadRich says:
    April 13, 2022 at 11:52 pm

    Goodness but I have a lot of Henry Patterson / Jack Higgins audiobooks. He’s kept me alive many times on the sleepy-eyed museum run to Houston.