Hertha Meyer (3 May 1902 – 30 August 1990) was a Brazilian biologist and director of the Carlos Chagas Filho Biophysics Institute at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. Born in Germany, she was educated in a technical course in infectious diseases in Berlin. Following Jewish persecution under the Nazi regime, she moved to Italy to work under Giuseppe Levi at the University of Turin. As antisemitism rose in Italy, she emigrated to Brazil where she joined the faculty of Oswaldo Cruz Institute. She transferred to the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro to head the Carlos Chagas Filho Biophysics Institute, where a separate laboratory called Laboratório de Ultraestrutura Celular Hertha Meyer (Hertha Meyer Laboratory of Cellular Ultrastructure) was established in her name. Meyer pioneered the methods of cell culture, specifically useful for protozoan parasites such as Toxoplasma, Plasmodium and Trypanosoma. She developed a method for electron microscopy that was used in the structural description of protozoans and discoveries of cell organelles. Her cell culture method led to the discovery of nerve growth factor, a protein that regulates development and survival of neurones.
Life and career Meyer was born in Germany. She studied a technical course in infectious diseases at the Lette-Verein training school in Berlin, completing the course in 1921. She was denied higher education in the university due to antisemitic regulations and worked as a technician at the Robert Koch Institute (then called the Royal Prussian Institute for Infectious Diseases) in Berlin. In 1926, she moved to Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Dalheim to work under Albert Fischer (or more likely Emil Fischer), who trained her in tissue culture. She made her first scientific publication with Fischer in 1928. Between 1930 and 1933, she worked at the clinical laboratory of the University of Berlin. To escape the escalating persecutions of Jews as Hitler's Nazi took over the German government, Meyer moved to Italy in 1933. She managed to find a job of technician at the University of Turin. In Turin, Meyer was enrolled for a course in cytology of the nervous system and graduated under Giuseppe Levi, professor of human anatomy and pioneer of culturing cells. [It is also possible that she worked for Levi, and was not his student.] There she befriended Levi's students like Renato Dulbecco, Salvador Luria, Rita Levi-Montalcini and Eugenia Sacerdote, all of who turned out to be notable scientists (the first three winning Nobel prizes). Antisemitic restrictions also became stronger in Italy so that Meyer was compelled to emigrate in Brazil in 1937 (or more likely 1939). In Rio de Janeiro, she got a job at the Manguinhos (or Manguinhos-Maré) campus of the Oswaldo Cruz Institute. She used her skills in tissue culture to develop vaccines, especially that of yellow fever from which she came to be noticed by the scientific community. In 1938, Carlos Chagas Filho, who had become chair of the biological physics at the Oswaldo Cruz Institute a year before, decided to established an independent biophysics laboratory as an "informal" extension of his own research. His focus was to set up a tissue culture laboratory, for which he was able to get financial support from Guilherme Guinle, a banker and a philanthropist, in 1940. He came to learn that Meyer's works were exactly the kind he wanted. Accepting his invitation, Meyer became the official director of his laboratory in 1941. Her ability as a research scientist and head of the laboratory was reflected by a series of research reports by the very next year. However, Filho received a threat from Nazi supporters that his research fund would be suspended if he continued to employ Meyer (mentioned as "an Israeli woman"), which he completely ignored. Meyer's salary was cut off for several months, but Filho fought to restore it. In 1945, the laboratory was recognised as an autonomous research centre, becoming the Biophysics Institute (officially Carlos Chagas Filho Institute of Biophysics) with major funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, and affiliated to the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. Within a decade, the institute became the "most efficient tissue culture unit" in the world, as Levi-Montalcini put it. In 1963, she returned to Turin to see a new microcinematography developed by Carl Zeiss. She persuaded Filho to procure one at the Biophysics Institute, and was installed there in 1970 from funds provided by the World Health Organization. For her research contributions, Meyer was awarded Doctor Honoris Causa from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro in 1980. She was elected to the Brazilian Academy of Sciences, and received the Admiral Álvaro Alberto Award in 1974, Universidade Estácio de Sá award in 1980, and the Oswaldo Cruz Medal in 1982. After her death, her laboratory was renamed Laboratório de Ultraestrutura Celular Hertha Meyer (Hertha Meyer Laboratory of Cellular Ultrastructure).
Contributions
Tissue culture technique Unlike other parasites, parasitic protozoans are difficult to study due to their small size and association with blood cells. After the discoveries since late 19th century the nature of their infections and diseases they caused, no advancement was made in laboratory culture for half a century. The first successful culture of any protozoan parasite was achieved by Meyer and her colleague Felipe Nery Guimarães. Meyer and Guimarães worked on Toxoplasma gondii, a protozoan that causes neurological disorders (toxoplasmosis) in a wide range of mammals including humans. After failing with several tissues for maintaining the parasites in culture plates, they used chicken embryos in a Maximow slide which proved to be a success. They reported the study in 1942 in the journal Revista Brasileira de Biologia (later Brazilian Journal of Biology). The procedure made way for further developments of culture methods using various mammalian tissues and cells. In 1942, Meyer with Cecilio Romaña From the basic method, Meyer was able to develop culture methods for other protozoans including Trypanosoma cruzi (that causes Chagas disease) and Plasmodium gallinaceum (that causes bird malaria). By 1948, she was able to work out the details of the developmental stages of T. cruzi.
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