Biochemist Hungers To Win Battle Against Killer Diseases

Allan Goldstein believes the thymosins he discovered can cure immune diseases, and he hopes his company and institute will prove it WASHINGTON--Science moves too slowly for biochemist Allan Goldstein. For most of his professional life, he has been trying to unravel the mysteries of the human immune system through a better understanding of a group of hormones known as thymosins. He discovered them 26 years ago, and their use in 1974 to save the life of a five-year-old girl, along with his encou

Written byDiana Morgan

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Allan Goldstein believes the thymosins he discovered can cure immune diseases, and he hopes his company and institute will prove it

WASHINGTON--Science moves too slowly for biochemist Allan Goldstein. For most of his professional life, he has been trying to unravel the mysteries of the human immune system through a better understanding of a group of hormones known as thymosins. He discovered them 26 years ago, and their use in 1974 to save the life of a five-year-old girl, along with his encouraging but inconclusive research findings, have led him to believe in their curative powers in the war against cancer, hepatitis, and other killers.

Goldstein has been impatient for much of his career, however, with the type of slow, steady progress that his NIH grant would permit. In 1980 the chairman of the biochemistry department of George Washington University in Washington, D.C., took out a $100,000 bank loan and ...

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