Alick Isaacs, 1921-1967

Abstract

Medical research has suffered a sad blow in the death at the early age of 45 of Alick Isaacs, the discoverer of interferon and one of Britain’s leading virologists. ‘His paternal grandparents, Barnet Galinsky and Leah Schreiber, hailed from the small towns of Saki and Tels in Lithuania, where, so far as is known, their ancestors had lived for generations as peasants and small traders. Alick’s grandmother, whom he knew well in his boyhood, was a shrewd and kindly woman. About the year 1880 anti-Semitic oppression, which had long been a feature of the Lithuanian scene, was intensified and many Jews, Alick’s grandparents among them, fled the country. On arrival in England, unable to speak the language, Alick’s grandfather gave his name to the immigration officials as Barnet the son of Isaac, and thus received the English surname Isaacs. At first he settled in Leeds where he worked as a tailor’s presser. It was there that he married and that Alick’s father Louis, the first of the five children of the marriage, was born in 1890. Soon after, his parents moved to Wigan and then to Glasgow, where the family settled in the Gorbals area. Barnet was barely able to support his family, and at the age of 12 Louis left school and started work as a butcher’s message boy. Louis was everything that his father was not—intelligent, ambitious, cheerful and hard-working. From his earliest days he was determined to drag his family from the poverty in which they lived and to attain the standards of material and cultural well-being which he saw around him.