Wilson Smith

Wilson Smith FRCP FRS (21 June 1897, Great Harwood at Blackburn; – 10 July 1965, Woolton Hill at Newbury) was a British physician, virologist and immunologist.

When Wilson Smith was ten years old, his father died and his mother took care of the four children alone.

From 1919 he studied medicine at the University of Manchester with degree qualification as both physician and surgeon (M.B., Ch.B.)

There in 1933 he, in collaboration with Christopher Andrewes and Patrick Laidlaw, succeeded in isolating human influenza A virus and transferring it to ferrets.

[1][2][3] In 1936 Frank Horsfall, Alice Chenoweth, and colleagues developed, in mouse lung tissue, a live influenza virus vaccine.

In 1937 Anatol Smorodintsev and colleagues in the Soviet Union reported on the administration of the Wilson Smith strain to humans, using doses that were lethal to mice.