Edwin Cohn

Origins and early life

Edwin Joseph Cohn was born in New York City on 17 December 1892, the son of Abraham Cohn and of Maimie Einstein, took his doctorate at the University of Chicago in 1917, and spent his working life at Harvard Medical School, where he headed the department of physical chemistry from 1935 to 1949.

Work and career

He began with the proteins of liver, concentrating the factor that George Minot had shown to relieve pernicious anaemia, and making a fatal disease treatable. In the summer of 1940 his laboratory found how to separate blood plasma into five major fractions with ethanol and water, at low temperature and controlled acidity, the method still known as the Cohn process. It yielded serum albumin against shock, gamma globulin for passive immunisation against measles and hepatitis, and fibrinogen and thrombin to stop bleeding.

When Pearl Harbor was attacked on 7 December 1941, every bottle of albumin in Boston was flown to Hawaii, where a surgeon gave it to seven men with severe burns, and all seven lived. By the end of the war more than two million donations had been processed into over half a million packages of albumin, and the process he devised is still the basis of plasma fractionation.

Recognition

Honours followed: the National Academy of Sciences elected him in 1943, and the Lasker Foundation gave its 1953 group award to the Harvard laboratory he directed, citing above all the fractionation of human blood plasma into substances of preventive and therapeutic value.

Later years

He died suddenly in Boston on the night of 1 October 1953, at sixty, still holding the Higgins University Professorship, after thirty years in which Harvard had been the whole of his working life. The standard biographies do not state his origins; his place in this directory rests on Jewish reference works, among them the Israeli daily Haaretz, which gave its "This Day in Jewish History" column to his birth.