William "Bill" Fleming Hoggan Jarrett, RCVS, FRCPath, FRCPG, FRS (1928–2011) was a British pathologist.
Personal life
Bill was born on 2 January 1928 in Glasgow. He studied at Lenzie Academy, Glasgow, and Glasgow Veterinary College. His father, though a joiner and cabinetmaker, came from a farming background and moved his family shortly afterwards to an agricultural smallholding near Cumbernauld. Their early life there no doubt influenced Bill, his elder brother Tom and younger brother Oswald to study veterinary medicine. Bill graduated from Glasgow Veterinary College with honours in 1947 and then, already attracted to research, studied for a PhD, training in animal pathology at the College and in human pathology with Dan Cappell, Professor of Pathology at the Medical School. Consequently, he had a wide understanding of animal and human diseases which laid the foundation for his future research in comparative medicine.
He taught at the University of Glasgow. In 1952 Bill married Anna Sharp, then a Lecturer at the Glasgow and West of Scotland College of Domestic Science. They eventually established a home in the countryside north of Glasgow that became a welcoming focus of generous hospitality for their family and huge circle of close friends, embracing a wide range of talented people from all walks of life and nationalities. Bill and Anna had known each other since their school days at Lenzie Academy when they had developed a passion for the Scottish countryside, especially the mountains. Over the years they engaged in sports that carried a certain frisson: mountaineering, skiing, motor rallying and particularly sailing, on the west coast of Scotland, France and Mallorca. At the same time Bill was a talented musician (he played trumpet, guitar and sang with a Scots and jazz bent), passionate about politics, a voracious reader and bon viveur (malt whiskies, and oysters at the Oyster Bar of the Grand Central Station in New York among his favourites).
He died on 27 August 2011. He is succeeded by his daughters Freda and Ruth, both distinguished medical graduates, Freda’s children Amanda and Hamish, and his brother Oswald.
Research
In 1964, he discovered the retrovirus that causes leukemia and lymphoma in cats. During diagnostic pathology work at Garscube, Bill noted a very much higher prevalence of lymphoma in cats than in man. When a local veterinary practitioner drew to his attention to a household of cats in which a large number of cases had occurred in a short period of time, Bill considered that the reason might be that the disease was infectious, like the condition in domestic poultry and laboratory mice. He set up transmission experiments in cats using material from one of these cases. In 1963, after an incubation period of over a year, the disease was transmitted and a virus was demonstrated in the resulting tumours. This was subsequently shown to be a novel retrovirus, feline leukaemia virus (FeLV).
The discovery of FeLV immediately provoked great interest in the field of oncology, coming at a time in the early 1960s when viruses were becoming seriously considered as causes of cancer in man. It was described as ‘Exhibit A’ in an application to the US Congress by the NCI for substantial funding to set up the Special Virus Cancer Program in 1968, which established an infrastructure for subsequent virus hunting in human cancers. Subsequently the most direct impact of FeLV on human medicine was the influence of Bill’s work on his friend Robert Gallo at NCI. Gallo was persuaded to explore human T-cell leukaemias for viruses after Bill found that most lymphomas caused by FeLV in cats were of T-lymphocyte origin. He established a way to grow T-cells in long-term culture from which came his discovery of the first human retrovirus, human T-lymphotropic virus (HTLV-1), and later human immunodeficiency virus (HIV).