Whipple, George Hoyt (1878-1976), was an American physician and medical researcher who discovered the relationship between diet and the formation of red blood cells. His discovery cast new light on anemia, a weakened condition that people develop when their red blood cells lack normal hemoglobin. Hemoglobin is the substance that makes blood red and that carries oxygen from the lungs to the body tissues.
Whipple experimented on dogs with anemia. When he fed the animals liver, their hemoglobin production increased and their anemia disappeared. This research led to use of a diet rich in liver to treat human patients with pernicious anemia, a disease that had always been fatal. American physicians George R. Minot and William P. Murphy developed the liver treatment in 1926. For their discoveries, Whipple, Minot, and Murphy received the 1934 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine.
Whipple was born in Ashland, New Hampshire. He graduated from Yale University in 1900, received an M.D. degree from the School of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University in 1905, and joined the staff of Johns Hopkins. In 1914, he became director of the Hooper Foundation for Medical Research at the University of California at San Francisco. From 1921 to 1953, Whipple served as dean of medicine at the University of Rochester in New York. There he continued to work on blood and especially on thalassemia, a hereditary form of anemia caused by a defect in the hemoglobin molecule.
