Sir William Dunn School of Pathology

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Location of Sir William Dunn School of Pathology within central Oxford

The Sir William Dunn School of Pathology^[1] is a department within the University of Oxford. Its research programme includes the cellular and molecular biology of pathogens, the immune response, cancer and cardiovascular disease. It teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in the medical sciences.

The school is named for Sir William Dunn, 1st Baronet, of Lakenheath, whose will provided the initial funding.^[2] It is located towards the east end of South Parks Road, to the north of the city centre.

History

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The first course of Pathology teaching in the University of Oxford was given in 1894 by Professor John

The first Department of Pathology was opened in 1901 and functioned until 1927 when it was handed over to Pharmacology on completion of the new purpose-built Sir William Dunn School of Pathology. This had been made possible by a munificent

The first full Professor of Pathology,

The textbook, General Pathology,[5] based on the preclinical course at the Dunn School, was first published in 1954, and went through four editions. For many years it was the international standard text on the subject.

After penicillin, the work on antibiotics was continued in the Dunn School by Abraham and Guy Newton, who during the 1950s discovered, purified and established the structure of cephalosporin C, the first of the cephalosporin family of antibiotics. This compound and the ring structure on which it was based were patented, and both Newton and Abraham set up trusts out of the royalties that they received. The Edward Penley Abraham Research Fund, the EPA Cephalosporin Fund and the Guy Newton Research Fund are dedicated to the support of medical, biological and chemical research in the Dunn School, Lincoln College and the University of Oxford.

Florey was succeeded as Professor in 1963 by Henry Harris, another expatriate Australian, who had arrived in Oxford in 1952 to do a DPhil under Florey's supervision. Harris's main interest was in cell biology and especially what was later to become the science of somatic cell genetics. With John Watkins he developed the technique of cell fusion for the study of the physiology and genetics of higher cells. They demonstrated that cell fusion provided a general method for the amalgamation of different cell types across the barriers imposed by species differences and by the process of differentiation.^[6] This technique was one of the main roots of somatic cell genetics and, in due course, resulted in the production of monoclonal antibodies.

It was also by means of cell fusion that Harris and Goss devised the first systematic method for determining the order of genes along the human chromosome and the distances between them. In 1969 Harris, collaborating with George Klein in Stockholm, showed that when a wide range of malignant tumour cells were fused with normal fibroblasts, the resulting hybrids were not malignant and had the morphological character of fibroblasts.^[7] This meant that there were normal genes that had the ability to suppress malignancy. These genes are now known as tumour suppressor genes and work on them has become a world-wide industry. Harris's research was supported mainly by what is now Cancer Research UK, (originally The British Empire Cancer Campaign, BECC, and then The Cancer Research Campaign, CRC.)

In 1977

The former Head of department, Herman Waldmann, was appointed in 1994. Waldmann's principal interest is in the study of immunological tolerance and application of immunology to the clinic. Professor Matthew Freeman, FRS, became Head of Department in January 2013.

In 2007 Florey's laboratory was proclaimed by the Australian Government as one of the first three sites on the List of Overseas Places of Historic Significance to Australia.

Scientists

• James Ritchie (1864-1923): first University lecturer in Pathology in Oxford, 1897. Organised the first undergraduate courses in Pathology and Bacteriology. Helped to fund and build first University department of Pathology in Oxford (1901). Edited standard texts in both Bacteriology (with Muir) and Pathology (with Pembrey). Founder member and first Secretary of the Pathological Society of GB and I. Left Oxford to return to Edinburgh in 1906.
• Ernest Ainley-Walker (1871-1955): elected to a fellowship in University College in 1903, the first ‘medical tutor’ in any Oxford College. Published a textbook of Pathology in 1904. Acting Head of Pathology Department when Ritchie left and on several occasions when Dreyer was absent. Also appointed as first Dean of Oxford Medical School from 1922.
• A. Duncan Gardner (1884-1978): invited to Oxford in 1915 to set up MRC Bacteriological Standards laboratory with Dreyer. Remained in Pathology until his retirement in 1958. Regius Professor of Medicine 1948–56.
• Sir Peter Medawar (1915-1987): graduate student with Howard Florey 1936–9; the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1960 "for discovery of acquired immunological tolerance"
• Sir John E. Walker (1941-): graduate student with Edward Abraham 1965–9; the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1997 "for the elucidation of the enzymatic mechanism underlying the synthesis of adenosine triphosphate (ATP)". Now Director of the MRC Dunn Human Nutrition Unit in Cambridge.
• George Brownlee: Professor of Chemical Pathology (1978-2008). Cloned and expressed human clotting factor IX,^[8][9] providing a recombinant source of this protein for Haemophilia B patients who had previously relied on the hazardous blood-derived product. With Peter Palese and co-workers, developed the first "reverse genetics" system for influenza virus, markedly speeding up the process of developing flu vaccines ^[10]
• Medical Research Council
  .
• Alan Williams: Succeeded Gowans as Director of the MRC Cellular Immunology Unit in 1977. With Cesar Milstein in Cambridge, he was the first to use monoclonal antibody technology to analyse molecular composition of the cell surface, and in doing so identified CD4 for the first time.^[12]
• Elizabeth Robertson FRS is a British scientist based at the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology, University of Oxford.^[13] She is Professor of Developmental Biology^[14] and a Wellcome Trust Principal Research Fellow.^[15] She is best known for her pioneering work in developmental genetics, having demonstrated how genetic mutations could be introduced into the mouse germ line through genetically altered embryonic stem cells.^[16]
• organ transplant
  patients.
• regulatory T cells
  and their role in prevention of immune-mediated pathology, particularly in the context of intestinal inflammation.
• Emeritus Professor of Pathology
  . Waldmann is known for his work on immune tolerance as they relate to grafts and for development of therapeutic monoclonal antibodies for clinical application.