Margaret Gladys Smith, mother of cytomegalovirus: 60th anniversary of cytomegalovirus isolation.

Abstract

In the year 2014, the ‘cytomegalovirus community’ of researchers commemorated the 60th anniversary of cytomegalovirus isolation by Margaret Gladys Smith (1896– 1970), former faculty member and Professor of Pathology at the Washington University in St. Louis, School of Medicine (Fig. 1). The year 1954 brought a number of chronicle events: the ‘birth’ of cytomegalovirus in Saint Louis/ Missouri, a total solar eclipse, the ‘Niagara rock fall’, the ‘miracle of Bern,’ and, last and least, a baby boy was born in the Bavarian Alps for whom the scientific achievements by Margaret Gladys Smith should become sort of destiny. Histopathological alterations characteristic of infection by an agent now known as cytomegalovirus, namely enlarged ‘cytomegalic’ cells with intranuclear inclusions, were first observed by the pathologist Dr. Ribbert in sections of the kidney of a stillborn presenting with Lues-like symptoms and interstitial nephritis. The ‘cradle of cytomegalovirus’ is Dr. Ribbert’s case report given at a meeting of the medical section of the Natural History Society of Prussian Rhineland and Westphalia, held on June 27, 1881, in Bonn, Germany [1]. After a period when cytomegalic cells were mistaken for protozoa, specifically for Gregarines, ([2], see also [3]), von Glahn and Pappenheimer were first to propose a viral etiology of the intranuclear inclusions associated with visceral disease [4]. In 1950, Wyatt et al. [5] coined the figurative name ‘cytomegalic inclusion disease (CID)’ for the clinical manifestations in newborns after congenital infection, though a