Eleanor Johnson Tobie, Theodor von Brand, and Benjamin Mehlman (1950) published a report entitled “Cultural and physiological observations on Trypanosoma rhodesiense and Trypanosoma gambiense,” in the Journal of Parasitology 36: 48–54. This is another important paper as defined by the number of citations reported by ISI several years ago. The Tobie et al. contribution was the first really useful procedure for the in vitro culture of these extremely important African trypanosomes. They devised a diphasic system that employed rabbit blood rather than that of humans, making it relatively simple and inexpensive.
The 1950s and early 1960s represented an era in which a number of remarkable in vitro culture procedures were developed for several different protozoan and helminth parasites, including, for example, Ligula intestinalis, Echinococcus granulosus, and Hymenolepis diminuta. In the early 1970s, I had the privilege of working in London at Imperial College with an acknowledged...