How was Transfer Factor discovered?
In 1949 Dr. H. Sherwood Lawrence was working on the problem of tuberculosis. What he was trying to discover was if any component of the blood could convey a tubercular sensitivity from an exposed recovered donor to a naive recipient. Whole blood transfusions could be used but only between people of the same blood type. Lawrence first separated the blood’s immune cells, the lymphocytes or white blood cells, from the whole blood. Then he broke open the lymphocytes and separated the contents of the cells into various size fractions. What he found was that a fraction of small molecules was able to transfer tuberculin sensitivity to a naive recipient. This is what Dr. Lawrence called transfer factor.
In 1949 Dr. H. Sherwood Lawrence was working on the problem of tuberculosis which was a major health concern of the time. What he was trying to discover was if any component of the blood could convey a tubercular sensitivity from an exposed recovered donor to a naive recipient. Whole blood transfusions could be used but only between people of the same blood type. Lawrence first separated the blood’s immune cells, the lymphocytes or white blood cells, from the whole blood. Then he broke open the lymphocytes and separated the contents of the cells into various size fractions. What he found was that a fraction of small molecules was able to transfer tuberculin sensitivity to a naive recipient. This is what Dr. Lawrence called “transfer factor”.
