By Shirish N. Kavadi
In the early twentieth century leukaemia was a major mystery in medical science. Research into the disease was constrained by lack of or inadequate funding. The Lady Tata Memorial Trust (LTMT) established in 1932 in Bombay was among the earliest philanthropic efforts to provide fellowships and grants to some of the leading researchers in Europe and US. A pioneer in global health medical philanthropy, it contributed significantly to the advancement of knowledge about leukaemia. Much has been written about the contribution of Western philanthropic foundations to medical research, notably the Rockefeller Foundation, but very little is known about the LTMT. The Trust was founded at a time when, “[l]eukemia was an orphan disease, abandoned by internists, who had no drugs to offer it, and by surgeons, who could not possibly operate on blood… The illness lived on the borderlands of illnesses, a pariah lurking between disciplines and departments.”[1] From the time of its establishment to well into the 1950s, the LTMT was an important source of funding support for several leading European leukaemia researchers who went on to win international acclaim for their research. This Shells and Pebbles blog examines the work of the LTMT during the first two decades since its establishment and throws light on a little known aspect in the entangled history of Indian philanthropy and western medicine.
The Founding
In June 1931 Lady Meherbai Tata, the wife of Sir Dorabji Tata, the Parsi industrialist and philanthropist from Bombay, died of leukaemia in the UK. The disease was extremely rare and little was known about its treatment. Dorabji resolved to support enquiries into the nature and cause of this disease so that a cure could eventually be discovered.[2] In early 1932 Sir Fredrick Sykes, the then Governor of Bombay, proposed to Dorabji the setting up of a radium institute for the treatment of cancer in Bombay. Dorabji agreed but passed away in June 1932, prior to which he had endowed Rs. 25,000,000 as a corpus fund to establish the LTMT.
The LTMT aimed to support research into blood diseases. Sir Walter Fletcher, Secretary of the British Medical Research Council, advised Dorabji that by confining to leukaemia research the LTMT was unlikely to receive many applicants and suggested broadening the scope to include other blood related diseases. Important discoveries were being made about certain lethal forms of anaemia, and hence it seemed appropriate to include other blood diseases in the trust’s focus of attention.[3] Deferring to Fletcher’s advice the LTMT provided grants, scholarships or fellowships “for approved research work on diseases of the blood, with special reference to leukaemia” and “to suitably qualified persons of any nationality and in any country of the world.” [4] Most of the work supported by the Trust was experimental, and its policy was to recommend support for research at the growing edge of scientific knowledge. “Around the world-flung field, for healing for mankind,” lines from Henry Tweedy’s tribute to a director of the Ciba Foundation, perhaps best sum up the scope and outlook of the LTMT.[5]
From its founding onwards , the LTMT has had two Scientific Advisory Committees (SAC). The one based in Bombay (now Mumbai) awarded grants to Indian medical researchers for general medical research. The other, London-based European SAC supported leukaemia research in Europe. Sir Walter Fletcher was the latter’s first Chairperson. After Fletcher’s demise in 1933, Sir Henry Dale, then Director of the National Institute for Medical Research, and member of the SAC became the Chairperson in January 1934, a post he held for 25 years. Other members included prominent researchers from the University of Edinburgh, the Lister Institute, the Humboldt University in Berlin, and the School of Medicine in Paris.[6]
The European Awards
Four-fifths of the income of the Trust was made available to the European SAC for awards to researchers in Europe, the US, and the British Empire except India. From its inception to the mid 1950s the SAC awarded grants, scholarships and fellowships to around 50 researchers. With nearly 22 recipients, the Scandinavian predominance was evident. Of these three fourths went to Danish medical scientists. Scandinavia and particularly Denmark thus appear to have been the centre for leukaemia research in the 1930s and the 1940s in Europe. The UK followed with around 10 awardees. Among researchers from other nationalities who benefited from financial support of the Trust, six were from France, three from Germany, two from Italy and Hungary each, while there was one each from Poland, Belgium and South Africa. Only two American cancer researchers, Eugene Opie and Jacob Furth of Cornell University Medical College, received funds for their work on leukaemia, at least partly because of relatively greater funding opportunities in the US.
The Research
The research on blood diseases that the Trust supported was primarily experimental work on leukaemia in birds and mammals; treatment of leukaemia by drugs; tissue culture studies; clinical, pathological and statistical studies of human leukaemia metabolism of carcinogenic hydrocarbons in relation to treatment of leukaemias; treatment of leukaemias and Hodgkin’s disease; treatment of acute leukaemias by exsanguinous–transfusion; treatment of megaloblastic anaemias; studies of bone marrow function in anaemias and leukaemias; malignant disease. Research was conducted in childhood leukaemia and its treatment; epidemiology of leukaemia; tissue compatibility and bone marrow transplantation.
In the 1930s much experimental work designed to discover how leukaemia arose and spread in the body was concerned with transmission. In 1937 one of the most distinguished scientists supported by the Trust, Jacob Furth, showed that leukaemia could be transmitted from one mouse to another by the injection of a single leukaemia cell. This showed unequivocally that the descendents of a single malignant cell could expand their population in the recipient mouse until the animal was overwhelmed and died.[7] By 1951 leukaemia had come to be recognised as a type of malignant disease. The Trustees accepted the recommendation of the SAC “to consider any promising proposals for research on malignant disease in general that seemed likely also to shed light on leukaemia.”[8] This remained the policy of the Trust.
Dissemination of research
Much of the information and knowledge on leukaemia during this period was scattered and uncoordinated. Recognising the need for organisation and consolidation, the Trust worked to bring together leukaemia research workers through publications and conferences. In 1939 the SAC proposed compiling a comprehensive summary of the “existing state of knowledge of the experimental leukaemias and their relationship to human leukaemias.”[9] Most of it would cover the research supported by the Trust. The Danish scientist Julius Engelbreth-Holm was assigned the task. Originally written in Danish, it was translated into English by C.L. Heel. After the German invasion of Denmark in 1940 the manuscript was smuggled out and published under the title Leukaemia in Animals. The expenses were defrayed by Tata Ltd and the royalties were paid to the Trust.[10]
The Ciba Conference
In November 1953 the LTMT and the London based Ciba Foundation organised an international Symposium on leukaemia research. Many of the then and previous awardees of the LTMT attended.[11] Apart from reviewing the research done on leukaemia till then the Symposium was an effort at assessing the research the Trust had supported since its establishment.[12] Nearly half of the 35 international experts representing different disciplines who participated were either scientists supported by the Trust or members of the SAC at one time or another.[13] This Symposium was considered an important milestone in the history of leukaemia research with its published proceedings (1954) reportedly became a valuable source of new ideas and an inspiration for workers entering the field.[14]
Summing up
Lady Tata Memorial Trust support for leukaemia research in the Europe and the United States from 1932 to the early 1950s marks a unique event in the history of medicine that challenges and complicates in important ways conventional accounts of scientific interaction between the West and the Rest. At the time of its foundation, it was probably the only philanthropic organisation engaged in such work. By facilitating both the production and circulation of medical knowledge, LTMT engagement with leukaemia was an important step in the battle against the disease. Prominent researchers received grants and fellowships, enabling them to advance knowledge about leukaemia. Current LTMT funding has been overshadowed by other richer and larger philanthropies, but its support for leukaemia research in Europe, at a time when no such support was available, ascribes it with special significance which historians of medicine may find useful to take note of.
o-o-o
Bio-note
Shirish N. Kavadi, whose career since 1980 has straddled both academia and the non-government sector, is a Pune based researcher who works on the history and politics of health and medicine in India with particular focus on philanthropy and medicine. He has a long list of publications to his name. In addition, Kavadi is a visiting faculty in Political Science at the Symbiosis School of Liberal Arts and the Symbiosis Law School, Pune, India. For a detailed account of the Lady Tata Memorial Trust and Leukaemia Research, see Kavadi’s article in the Economic and Political Weekly (2014).
Featured Image courtesy of Tata Central Archives: Lady Meherbai Tata and Sir Dorabji Tata, the Parsi industrialist who founded the Lady Tata Memorial Trust after his wife had passed away.
[1] Siddhartha Mukherjee, (2011), The Emperor of All Maladies, A Biography of Cancer (London: Fourth Estate): 27.
[2] R.M. Lala, (1984), The Heartbeat of A Trust. Fifty Years of the Sir Dorabji Tata Trust (New Delhi: Tata- McGraw– Hill Publishing Company Ltd): 11-12.
[3] David Galton, ‘Leukaemia, Past, Present, and Future: The Role of the International Awards of The Lady Tata Memorial Trust,’ September 1991, p. 1. Box No. 85, Tata Central Archives (TCA).
[4] LTMT Second Report 1947-52, p.1, Sir Edward Mellanby Papers, PP/MEL/B.16/ Contemporary Medical Archives Centre (CMAC), Wellcome Library, London.
[5] The lines are from ‘The Master Potter’s Jubilee’ by Henry Tweedy (1973) a tribute in verse to Dr. Gordon Wolstenholme, Director of the Ciba Foundation on his 60th birthday. Woodford, F. Peter,(1974), The Ciba Foundation: An Analytic History 1949-1974 (Amsterdam: Associated Scientific Publishers): 205.
[6] Galton, ‘Leukaemia, Past, Present, and Future’, p. 1.
[7] Galton, ‘Leukaemia, Past, Present, and Future’, p. 6. For a brief account of Furth’s contribution to leukaemia research, see his obituary by D.W. King, (1980) ‘Obituary: Jacob Furth, MD, 1896-1979,’ The American Journal of Pathology, pp. 291-94. For a biographical account, see Sidney Weinhouse and John J. Furth, (1993), Jacob Furth 1896-1976 (Washington, D.C.: National Academy of Sciences, 1993).
[8] Galton, ‘Leukaemia, Past, Present, and Future’, p. 3
[9] Ibid., p. 2
[10] Ibid.
[11] The Ciba Foundation was officially opened on 22 June 1949.One of its mandate was organising Medical ‘Conferences’ which consisted of Symposia and Study Groups. Between 1950 and 1974 it had organised 161 of these conferences. (Woodford 1974)
[12] Russi Lala notes that one out of every three delegates who attended the Conference had at one time or another been a recipient of a grant from the LTMT. (Lala 1984)
[13] Galton, ‘Leukaemia, Past, Present, and Future’, p. 5.
[14] Ibid.