John H. Dingle, Sc.D., M.D.
Brief Bio
John Holmes Dingle (1908–1973)was the forty-first president of the American Association of Immunologists, serving from 1957 to 1958. He was chair of the Department of Preventive Medicine at Case Western Reserve University from its founding in 1946 until 1969.
After earning his Sc.D. from the Johns Hopkins University School of Hygiene and Public Health in 1933, Dingle was an assistant bacteriologist at the Maryland State Department of Health Laboratory and a bacteriologist at the pharmaceutical firm, Upjohn Company. In 1935, he entered Harvard Medical School, where he conducted research under Hans Zinsser (AAI ’17, president 1919–20). He received his M.D. in 1939 and was a house officer at Boston Children’s Hospital for one year before being named the Frances Weld Peabody Fellow in medicine at the Thorndike Memorial Laboratory at Boston City Hospital and appointed an instructor in the Department of Bacteriology and Immunology at Harvard in 1941. As a consultant to what became the Armed Forces Epidemiological Board, Dingle was selected to head the Commission on Acute Respiratory Diseases based in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, shortly after the United States entered the Second World War. In 1946, after the war ended, Dingle took several members of this commission with him to start the Department of Preventative Medicine at what was then Western Reserve University. He stepped down as director of the department in 1969, the year that an undiagnosed musculoskeletal disease with which he had lived since his youth left him confined to a wheelchair. He continued on as the Elizabeth Severance Prentiss Professor of Preventive Medicine at Case Western University until his death from a heart attack four years later at the age of 65.
Lasker Award
1959 Albert Lasker Clinical Medical Research Award “for outstanding studies which have added significantly to our knowledge and ability to control acute respiratory diseases.” Click here for more details.
AAI Service History
Joined: 1941
President: 1957–1958
Vice President: 1956–1957
Councillor: 1953–195
The Journal of Immunology
Associate Editor: 1954–1959
Editorial Board: 1959–1963
Committees
Presidential committee to formulate a new resolution which might meet with the more general approval of the membership: 1954–1955 (chair)
Other Service
AAI representative to FASEB Committee on Loyalty and Clearance: 1955–1956
President's Address
"
The Curious Case of the Common Cold" Delivered April 15, 1958
The Journal of Immunology 81, no. 2 (1958): 91–97.
Awards and Honors
Institutional/Biographical Links