Harry Eagle, M.D.
Brief Bio
Harry Eagle was the forty-eighth president of the American Association of Immunologists, serving from 1964 to 1965. After 25 years with the U.S. Public Health Service (USPHS), Eagle joined the faculty of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in 1961 and helped shape the development of the young program for the next 27 years. He is best known for his development of Eagle’s minimum essential medium, which made it possible to culture mammalian cells.
Eagle received his M.D. from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in 1927 and began his career at the Johns Hopkins Hospital as an intern (1927–1928) and research fellow (1928–1929). Following three years at Hopkins medical school as an assistant (1929–1930) and an instructor (1930–1932), Eagle spent the 1932–1933 year as a National Research Council Fellow at Harvard. In 1933, Eagle joined the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, first as an associate bacteriologist (1933–1935) and later as an assistant professor (1935–1936). Commissioned into the USPHS in 1936, Eagle was named director of the USPHS Venereal Disease Research Laboratory and Laboratory of Experimental Therapeutics at the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health, where he remained until 1948. He then held several positions at the National Institutes of Health, including scientific director of the National Cancer Institute (1947–1949), chief of the Section of Experimental Therapeutics at the National Microbiological Institute (1949–1959), and chief of the Laboratory of Cell Biology at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (1959–1961). He joined the faculty at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in 1961 as founding chairman and professor of the Department of Cell Biology. Seven years later, he was chosen to head the newly formed Division of Biological Sciences. In 1971, he was named the first director of the Albert Einstein Cancer Research Center, a position he held until his retirement in 1988.
AAI Service History
Joined: 1953
President: 1964–1965
Vice President: 1963–1964
Councillor: 1954–1957, 1959–1962
The Journal of Immunology
Associate Editor: 1954–1959
Editorial Board: 1961–1965
Awards and Honors
Institutional/Biographical Links