Research
While at Cal Tech, Itano joined the lab of Linus Pauling and began working on sickle cell anemia, a genetic disease that Pauling was interested in. Pauling was convinced that sickle cell disease was caused by defective hemoglobin, and set Itano to find out what made sickle cell hemoglobin chemically different. After failing with a number of other techniques, Itano succeeded in differentiating normal and sickle cell hemoglobins using moving boundary electrophoresis. He used an apparatus designed by Stanley M. Swingle, a variation on the original apparatus of electrophoresis pioneer Arne Tiselius. He found that, under certain conditions, sickle cell hemoglobin is positively charged while normal hemoglobin is not, creating a difference in electrophoretic mobility. By 1956, Vernon Ingram had determined that this was caused by a single difference in peptide sequence, which by 1958 he determined to be a glutamic acid in place of a valine.
Itano's subsequent work brought the new field of "molecular medicine" to other genetic and blood diseases. In 1954, he won the Eli Lilly Award in Biological Chemistry, and in 1972 he won the Martin Luther King Jr. Medical Achievement Award, recognizing his sickle cell work.
Read more about this topic: Harvey Itano
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