George Hirst (virologist)
He directed the Public Health Research Institute in New York City (1956–1981), and was also the founding editor-in-chief of Virology, the first English-language journal to focus on viruses.
[2][3] There he combined research in collaboration with Frank Horsfall, Edwin D. Kilbourne and others with his army service, as a member of the Armed Forces Epidemiological Board's Commission on Influenza.
[2][4] After the Second World War, Hirst joined the Public Health Research Institute in New York City, which had been established in 1942, where he remained until his retirement in 1983.
He became head of the Infectious Diseases and Virology Divisions, and in 1956 succeeded L. Whittington Gorham as director of the institute, a position he held for nearly 25 years until 1981.
[13] In 1941, Hirst discovered that adding influenza virus particles to red blood cells caused them to agglutinate or stick together forming a lattice, a phenomenon called hemagglutination.
[2][3] Hemagglutination provided a convenient method of diagnosing influenza in the laboratory, which had previously been performed by cultivating the virus in ferrets.
[15][16] He soon realised that the hemagglutination assay could easily be adapted to measure the levels of antibody specific to the virus strain in human serum: any antibodies present bind to the influenza virus particles, prevent them from crosslinking red blood cells and so inhibit hemagglutination.
[2][3][15] This hemagglutination inhibition assay (HIA) can be applied to many other viruses carrying a hemagglutinin molecule, including rubella, measles, mumps, parainfluenza, adenoviruses, polyomaviruses and arboviruses, and is still widely used in influenza surveillance and vaccine testing.
[17][18][19][20] Hannah Hoag, writing in Nature Medicine in 2013, describes the assay as "the gold-standard serologic test to type influenza antibodies in humans and animals.
[3][23][24] Like hemagglutinin, neuraminidase is essential for the influenza life cycle, being required for the progeny virus to leave the host cell.
[25] Hirst founded the journal Virology in 1955, together with bacteriophage specialist Salvador Luria and plant virologist Lindsay Black.
