Nathaniel Waterman

Vocation

Dutch physician, biologist, cancer researcher, bacteriologist and serologist. His parents were the accountant Hijman Waterman (1848-1925) and Elizabeth van Praag (1855-1941). He studied medicine at Leiden University from 1900-1907, where he became an assistant in pathology to Professor Tendeloo. He was also influenced by Lorentz, Van Bemmelen, Einthoven and concentrated on experimental pathology, a field where biology, physics and chemistry merged. He graduated on 20 February 1907 (4h00 PM) in Leiden with the dissertation "Atheriosclerose door adrenaline" (Atherosclerosis through adrenaline). He became a general practitioner in Rotterdam, but also kept a private house laboratory where he experimented with pancreatic secretions. As such he was a predecessor to Banting, Best and McLeod in the discovery of insulin. In 1909 he married the laboratory worker Mina Rippe (1882-1970) in Rotterdam. In 1915 he was invited by the Dutch government to serve as a harbor hygienist in Curacao and to organize an health service for the Netherlands' Antillen. After he and his wife had done this with success, he visited in 1919 the Rockefeller Institute in New York, where he demonstrated a sample of Rous-sarcoma from Curacao. Already in 1911 Noble Price winner Peyton Rous (1879-1970) had discovered that tumor extracts (serum) with "a minute parasitic organism" could cause cancer in hens, but the involved viruses were still to small to be seen with light microscopes. In Boston and New York he studied the latest research methods in biochemistry, which he introduced afterwards into his next job at the on 10 October 1913 established Dutch Cancer Institute (NKI) in Amsterdam. In 1940 he was dismissed from the NKI because of his Jewish heritage. In 1942 he and his wife could escape from deportation to the Nazi concentration camps thanks to an assignment of the Ministry of Social Affairs to study the carcinogenicity of azo dyes, food additives that are still being used to color food. He was released from prison and confined to a new house and laboratory at home. Thanks to their scientific work the couple survived the war, but they lost two of their three children in concentration camps. In 1946 he helped reviving the Dutch Cancer Institute and the associated Antoni van Leeuwenhoek Hospital. After his retirement in 1953 he went on publishing on carcinogenicity. He died 31 January 1961 in Amsterdam.