In this video, we explore the greatest achievements of Michael Stoker in medical history. Sir Michael George Parke Stoker was a British physician and medical researcher in virology. Stoker's career of major accomplishments began during World War II when he served in the Royal Army Medical Corps in India between 1943 and 1947. During this time, he conducted vital research on typhus and other rickettsial diseases. Upon returning to civilian life, his first major achievement was identifying Q fever, caused by the bacterium Coxiella burnetii, as a significant public health issue in Great Britain. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, he mapped the epidemiology of the disease, showing how it spread from livestock to humans, which established his reputation as a premier researcher in infectious agents. In 1958, Stoker achieved a historic academic milestone by being appointed as the first Professor of Virology at a university in the United Kingdom, specifically at the University of Glasgow. This was the first chair of virology ever established in the country. A year later, in 1959, he founded and became the director of the Medical Research Council Institute of Virology in Glasgow. Under his leadership, the institute became a world-renowned center for research, where he fostered an environment of collaborative science that influenced a generation of virologists. During the early 1960s, Stoker collaborated with Ian Macpherson to develop the BHK-21 (Baby Hamster Kidney) cell line. This was an immense technical accomplishment because these cells could be grown indefinitely in a laboratory and were easily transformed by viruses. This cell line became, and remains today, a fundamental tool for the global production of vaccines, including those for foot-and-mouth disease. Throughout the 1960s, he also pioneered research into viral oncogenesis using the polyoma virus. He developed quantitative methods to measure how viruses transform healthy cells into cancerous ones, which provided critical insights into the molecular mechanisms of cancer. In 1968, Stoker was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society and was recruited as the Director of Research at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund in London. Over the next eleven years, he successfully modernized the organization by shifting its focus from traditional pathology toward the emerging fields of cell and molecular biology. By recruiting top-tier scientists and reorganizing the laboratories into small, independent research groups, he transformed the fund into one of the most prestigious cancer research institutions in the world. Stoker's contributions were recognized with a knighthood in 1980. That same year, he began his tenure as the President of Clare Hall at the University of Cambridge, serving until 1987. During the late 1980s, he made another landmark scientific discovery by identifying a protein he called the scatter factor. This protein, now known as hepatocyte growth factor or HGF, was found to induce motility in epithelial cells. This discovery has been fundamental to our understanding of cancer metastasis, as it explains one of the primary ways cancer cells break away from tumors to spread through the body. In conclusion, Michael Stoker was a monumental figure in 20th-century medicine whose accomplishments spanned from the identification of infectious diseases to the founding of academic virology and the discovery of mechanisms driving cancer spread. His legacy is defined by his leadership of world-class research institutions and his foundational work in cell culture and viral transformation, both of which continue to underpin modern biomedical science and vaccine development. If you found this video useful, like, share, and subscribe.
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• History of Michael Stoker | Tamil
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