History of Sickle Cell Anemia and How it Came About

1910 - Herrick provides the first formal description of sickle cell anemia when he reports that the blood smear of a dental student at the Chicago College of Dental Surgery contains "pear-shaped and elongated forms."

1927 - Hahn and Gillespie associate the sickling of red blood cells with low oxygen conditions.

1940 - Sherman reports that the sickling of red blood cells in the absence of oxygen is caused by a change in the hemoglobin molecule structure.

1948 - Watson suggests that the presence of fetal hemoglobin in the red blood cells of sickle cell newborns is the reason they do not show disease symptoms.

1949 - Physical chemist Linus Pauling publish "Sickle Cell Anemia, a Molecular Disease." This paper explains how protein electrophoresis was used to show that sickle cell hemoglobin differed in structure from normal hemoglobin. This was the first time that the cause of a disease was linked to a change in protein structure.

1956 - Vernon Ingram and J.A. Hunt sequence hemoglobin and discover that the change of a single amino acid in the protein sequence is the cause of sickle cell anemia.

1995 - Upon the completion of the Multicenter Study of Hydroxyurea in Sickle Cell Anemia, Charache reports that the anticancer drug hydroxyurea is the first to reduce the frequent, painful complications that characterize sickle cell disease.^[1]

Ally Gatmaitan and Alex Schwent