Alic Isaacs

Born in Britain in 1921, Alic Isaacs together with Jean Lindenmann discovered the antiviral substance that they called interferon in 1957. They were working on the phenomenon of viral interference. This is the process by which infections of cells by one virus prevents invasion by a second virus. They showed that when they treated a cell culture with a killed virus, the cell free fluid had the ability to make other cells resistant to virus infection. They isolated a protein from the culture fluid that had this antiviral property and called it interferon. This was the first cytokine to be identified.