Biographical Feature: Alexander C. Sonnenwirth, Ph.D.

TEXT

It was the spring of 1971, and I was at the Monsanto Company headquarters in St. Louis, MO, for a meeting of the regional ASM group when I first met Dr. Alex C. Sonnenwirth. I was a 2nd-year graduate student at the University of Missouri in Columbia and had traveled to St. Louis with other graduate students and my advisor to attend the Eastern Missouri regional ASM meeting. Dr. Sonnenwirth was one of the keynote speakers, and my first impressions were of a very capable and forceful person with a depth of knowledge and experience that made him an authority on clinical microbiology. Little did I know that our paths would cross many times in the ensuing years and that the pioneering research that he did on Gram-negative anaerobic bacteria would be instrumental in my own research activities many years later.

Alex C. Sonnenwirth was born in 1923 in Oradea, Romania. Born to Jewish parents and raised to speak multiple languages, including Hebrew, Romanian, and Hungarian, Alex completed his primary and secondary education in Oradea and then traveled to Budapest, Hungary, where he lived with relatives and worked as a photographer. When the atrocities of World War II overtook Europe, most of the residents of Oradea, including Alex's parents, became victims of the Holocaust. While Alex escaped the systematic extermination taking place in the death camps, he ended up spending 4 years in Auschwitz performing slave labor until liberated by Allied Forces. One can only imagine the horrors that were faced by Sonnenwirth during this time. Given the sacrifices and suffering that Sonnenwirth experienced during the war, it is not surprising that, having survived these atrocities, he took full advantage of every opportunity to excel in life that was offered to him.

After rescue by the Allied Forces, Sonnenwirth lived in one of the camps for displaced persons in Marburg, Germany, helping to repatriate other displaced persons, until he was awarded a Hillel scholarship that allowed him to immigrate to the United States in 1946, where he decided to study bacteriology at the University of Nebraska. He received a Bachelor of Science degree from University of Nebraska in 1950 and then continued his studies in bacteriology at Purdue University, where he was awarded a Master of Science degree in 1953. It was during his student years at Purdue that Alex met his future wife, Rosaline Soffer. They were married in 1953. After obtaining his Master's degree, Alex moved to St. Louis, MO, where he was appointed as the assistant director of the Division of Bacteriology at the Jewish Hospital.

In 1955, Sonnenwirth was appointed as the director of the Division of Bacteriology at the Jewish Hospital and also began his Ph.D. studies at Washington University under the guidance of Dr. Theodore Rosebury. Dr. Sonnenwirth completed his formal education and received his Ph.D. degree in 1960. In addition to his appointment as division director at the Jewish Hospital, Dr. Sonnenwirth also held numerous academic appointments over the years with the schools of Dentistry and Medicine, Pathology, and Microbiology at Washington University, culminating with an appointment in the Departments of Pathology and Microbiology as full professor in 1977. According to a former student, Dr. Alice Weissfeld, Dr. Sonnenwirth was highly respected for his high-quality laboratory work and the caring nature of Dr. Sonnenwirth and the people who worked in his laboratory. According to Alice, “When you took a job at Jewish, it was for life.”

Dr. Sonnenwirth's scientific interests were many and included early work improving the fluorescence microscopy techniques used to identify acid-fast bacilli in tissues and other specimens. He published a number of manuscripts that dealt with the characterization of organisms that normally reside in the intestine as pathogens isolated from the blood of severely ill patients. At a time when our understanding of the role of obligate anaerobes as human pathogens was limited to the toxigenic clostridial species, Dr. Sonnenwirth pursued research regarding the role of Gram-negative anaerobes, including Bacteroides and Fusobacterium species, as legitimate human pathogens. One of his publications from this research included the work of a fellow graduate student at the University of Missouri, Jacqueline Quick. Jackie spent her research time immunizing rabbits with strains of Bacteroides fragilis from the various subspecies (now separate species and, in some cases, separate genera) and trying to detect antibody in human sera to the various strains as well as working out a serogrouping system for this phenotypically similar group of organisms. Despite her best efforts, Jackie was never able to establish the equivalent of a Lancefield typing system for the B. fragilis group, although she did document the finding of antibody to these strains in humans. Dr. Sonnenwirth was a member of her Ph.D. committee and gave several seminars at the University of Missouri while I was a graduate student there, including a couple of seminars on the importance of the Bacteroides species as human pathogens. At the time, I had no idea that this group of organisms would become central to my own scientific research career. While there were some noteworthy advocates for this position in the early 1970s, including Dr. Sonnenwirth and Dr. Sidney Finegold, it was not widely accepted until our group, led by Dr. Sherwood Gorbach, developed an animal model for intra-abdominal sepsis some years later that defined the role of Gram-negative anaerobes in human disease, thereby documenting the early observations of Dr. Sonnenwirth and others. In addition, Jackie Quick's inability to establish a useful serogrouping system was later explained by the findings of Dennis Kasper and others of multiple structurally different capsular polysaccharides that could be turned on or off at will by strains of B. fragilis, thereby rendering reactivity to a specific antibody difficult to detect.

Dr. Sonnenwirth did not limit his scientific interests to a narrow range of activities but included topics spanning the spectrum of clinical microbiology. He edited Gradwohl's Clinical Laboratory Methods and Diagnosis, volume 2, as well as contributing numerous research articles on anaerobic bacteria, Yersinia enterocolitica, improvements in methods for immune detection of rubella virus, and use of fully automated microbial identification systems. The latter activity evaluated an instrument developed by the McDonnell Douglas Company called the AutoMicrobic system. Originally developed for NASA as a method to detect urinary tract pathogens during extended spaceflight, this system was the precursor to what we now know as the AMS Vitek system for automated identification and susceptibility testing. Dr. Sonnenwirth evaluated the earliest prototype of this instrument versus a variety of urinary tract pathogens, supporting the potential use of such automation in routine clinical microbiologic analysis. While Dr. Sonnenwirth explored a diverse array of microbiologic topics, his first love was the study of obligate anaerobes and their role in human disease.

Dr. Sonnenwirth gave generously of his time to the ASM. In addition to serving as the president of the Eastern Missouri regional branch of the ASM, he also served on a variety of national ASM committees over the years, including the examination board for the American Board of Medical Microbiology (where he elected to actually sit for the examination rather than be “grandfathered” in) and the ASM Council and as a fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology. He was also one of the early editorial board members for the Journal of Clinical Microbiology. In 1984, Dr. Sonnenwirth was given the Becton, Dickinson Award. This award “honors a distinguished scientist for research accomplishments that form the foundation for important applications in clinical microbiology.” Dr. Alex C. Sonnenwirth died on 1 March 1984, shortly after learning that he was to be the recipient of the Becton, Dickinson Award.

It is hard to document real-life experiences for someone that has passed away over 30 years ago. However, when I was asked to write this biographical sketch, I could not help but remember my own interactions with Dr. Sonnenwirth. Dr. Sonnenwirth was a powerful personality and not afraid to state what was on his mind. I can still remember (as can others, including Alice Weissfeld) this larger-than-life personality going to the microphone at national ASM meetings to ask a question, starting with “Sonnenwirth, St. Louis!” The speaker would know at this point that whatever was coming would be well thought out and demand a complete answer, sometimes to the detriment of the speaker. At the same time, when asked a question by an inexperienced graduate student, he would take the time to answer fully and without intimidation, clearly documenting his credentials as a teacher and mentor. When I began my work on B. fragilis, in collaboration with Dennis Kasper, I had forgotten the early observations that had been made by Dr. Sonnenwirth until I started to search the literature to determine what previous investigators had observed about this obligately anaerobic member of the human intestinal microbiome. At this point, Dr. Sonnenwirth's early publications on bacteremia reminded me that others had clearly pointed out the way to proceed with our research. I am indebted to Dr. Sonnenwirth for these early observations because they offered validation for our own work. Dr. Alex C. Sonnenwirth was a pioneer and a highly accomplished clinical microbiologist deserving of all the accolades he received.