Michael Stoker 1918–2013

Michael Stoker Sir Michael Stoker, a pioneer of virology and the cell biology of cancer cells, died on 13 August at the age of 95. Viruses have always been useful tools for probing the workings of cells, and Michael exploited tumor-causing viruses to gain a better understanding of oncogenic mechanisms at the dawn of the molecular biology of animal cells. During a long career, Michael not only made groundbreaking discoveries himself, such as immortal nontransformed cell lines and scatter factor, but he also had an extraordinary influence on generations of cell biologists. Michael George Parke Stoker was born on 4 July, 1918 in Taunton, England, where his Irish-born father was a physician. After school at Oakham, he studied medicine at Cambridge and gained clinical training at St Thomas’s Hospital at the beginning of World War II. He then enlisted in the Royal Army Medical Corps and was posted to India working in Lucknow and Hyderabad until, by a stroke of luck, he was sent to the army laboratories in Pune, a major military cantonment (called Poona in colonial times and that today houses India’s National Institute of Virology and National AIDS Research Institute). Michael gained his first experience of laboratory pathology research in Pune studying typhus and bush typhus with some remarkably talented medical scientists. They included Douglas Black (later President of the Royal College of Physicians) and Bill Hayes (who discovered bacterial conjugation and recombination). It was this experience that gave Michael his interest in infectious disease and led him into virology, for the typhus Rickettsia had not yet been distinguished from viruses. His research on typhus provided the material for his MD research thesis. On demobilization in 1947, Michael was appointed to a junior post in the Pathology Department in Cambridge and a fellowship at Clare College. Together with Peter Wildy, he began to study herpes simplex virus and exploited the then novel cell culture techniques that allowed human and animal viruses to propagate in vitro. Whereas the Pathology Department was rather old fashioned, Michael sought out the new electron microscope at the Cavendish Physics Laboratories to visualize virus particles, and he thus became friends with Max Perutz, John Kendrew, and the young Jim Watson. It was his success in Cambridge that led him to be appointed without his actually applying for the position to the first UK Chair in Virology at the University of Glasgow. The University planned to establish an Institute of Virology, including a Medical Research Council Unit of Virology with Michael as Director. Before moving there, however, Michael spent 6 months at the end of 1958 at Caltech with Renato Dulbecco, who was becoming interested in tumor viruses and in whose laboratory Howard Temin and Harry Rubin had just succeeded in developing an in vitro cell transformation assay for Rous sarcoma virus. Polyoma virus of mice had recently been discovered, and with the related simian virus SV40, it became a model for neoplastic transformation. In Glasgow, one particularly important contribution by Michael, together with Ian Macpherson, was the development in 1962 of BHK21 hamster kidney cell line, an