Theodore Vail Eulogy

Oswald Theodore Avery was born on the 21st of October, 1877, in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. He was born with initiative and resourceful parents, his father being a baptist minister. In 1887, when Oswald was ten, his family moved to New York where his father became the pastor of Mariner’s Temple at the lower east side of NYC. With Oswald’s mother involved with the charities and newsletter, and himself and his brother Ernest playing the clarinet to attract new attendees at the steps of the church, all of the Avery family participated in the church. Considering they were in New York City, one of the largest and most populous cities in the world, and living in the more impoverished areas, they did quite well with the church being the only means

There, he became the leader of the college band. While a Colgate, he befriended Henry Emerson Fosdick, soon-to-be notable clergymen, and excelled at literature, public speaking and debate. He graduated at the university with a BA in the humanities in 1900. Avery then entered the College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York. Before entering, he had very little background in scientific fields. There, in 1904, he received a medical degree. in 1907, Oswald Avery began working at a laboratory at Hoagland Laboratory in Brooklyn, after being distraught in not being able to optimally help some of his patients. This was the first privately endowed bacterial research laboratory in the United States. There, Avery earned the nickname “The Professor”, or more commonly, “Fess”. He worked on many strains of bacteria, and worked on the bacteriology of yogurt as well as tuberculosis. Rufus Cole, the director of the Hospital of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, became interested in Avery’s work, specifically on tuberculosis.. Consequently, Cole offered a job which Avery accepted in 1913. Avery then worked 35 years on one specific species of pneumonia-creating bacteria called Pneumococcus. His partners were elite class scientists including as Alphonse R. Dochez, René Dubos, Harriett Ephrussi-Taylor, Michael Heidelberger, Rebecca Craighill Lancefield, Maclyn McCarty, and Colin MacLeod.