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Thalassemia: the long road from the bedside through the laboratory to the community

Nature Medicine volume 16, pages 1112–1115 (2010)Cite this article

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I owe my long interest in inherited blood diseases and tropical medicine to a series of characteristically bizarre decisions by the British Army. In 1958, 2 years after qualifying in medicine from Liverpool University, I was drafted for 2 years of compulsory National Service. Terrified of flying, snakes and bullets, I volunteered to serve in the UK. So it was that a few weeks later, and after a long and eventful voyage on a troop ship that ran aground in the Suez Canal, I found myself in charge of the Children's Ward in the British Military Hospital in Singapore. At that time, the hospital served the soldiers and families of the Commonwealth forces who were engaged in the long war against the Chinese communists in Malaya, as it was then called. One of my first patients was a Nepalese child whose father was serving in a Gurkha regiment. She had been profoundly anemic from the first year of life and had been kept alive by monthly blood transfusions. After a long struggle, and with the help of Frank Vella, a biochemist from Singapore University, we found that this child had thalassemia, an inherited blood disease that was thought at the time to be restricted to Mediterranean populations.

I spent the second year of my National Service working in a military hospital in Taiping, close to the Thai border where the remaining communist terrorists were being rounded up. There I saw a wide spectrum of tropical diseases, and, in my spare time and with a primitive electrophoresis setup comprising car batteries and filter paper, searched for more individuals with thalassemia.

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Figure 1: Globin synthesis in thalassemia.
Figure 2: Mechanisms for the phenotypic diversity of β-thalassemia.
Figure 3: Kurunegala, Sri Lanka.

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  1. David Weatherall is at the Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine, University of Oxford, John Radcliffe Hospital, Headington, Oxford, UK.,

    David Weatherall

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  1. David Weatherall
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Correspondence to David Weatherall.

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Weatherall, D. Thalassemia: the long road from the bedside through the laboratory to the community. Nat Med 16, 1112–1115 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/nm1010-1112

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