William P. MurphyBorn 6 Feb 1892; died 9 Oct 1987 at age 95.American physician who with George R. Minot in 1926 reported success in the treatment of pernicious anemia with a liver diet. The two men shared the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1934 with George H. Whipple, whose research they had built upon. Anaemia is seen as a loss of red blood corpuscles, effectively a dilution of the blood. With the liver diet, it became clear that anemia was not (as then supposed) due to the presence of a supposed poisonous substance, but rather to the absence of a substance needed to produce red blood corpuscles. Such a substance must be present in liver, since the patient's condition became normal when liver was supplied as a food. Thus these researchers had discovered a new function of the liver. |
