Moshe Wolman - Medical Career

Medical Career

From 1938 to 1940, he worked in the Cancer Research Institute of the Hebrew University and did residency at the department of Internal Medicine of the Hadassah Hospital. In the 1940s, he volunteered to serve in the British Army and joined the 101 Military Mission (the famous Gideon Force of Orde Wingate). He was involved in the operation in 1941 that brought Emperor Haile Selassie back to occupied Ethiopia and was in charge of a medical ward and clinical laboratory in the Menelik Hospital in Addis Ababa in 1941-1944. In 1944, he was posted in the Central Pathology Laboratory of the Middle East Forces located in Cairo, Egypt. In 1945 he was appointed as head of the Pathology Laboratory of the 27th General Hospital in Tel-El-Kabir, Egypt.

After his release from the army in 1946, Wolman joined the department of Pathology of the Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem and was involved in histochemical research. He taught at the newly founded Medical School of the Hebrew University. In this period, he studied the chemical significance of the periodic acid-Schiff (PAS) staining method and showed that the method is not specific for carbohydrates as was thought at the time, but also stains lipids.

In 1951 his research included histochemistry of viral and non-viral inclusion bodies and he continued to study chemical fixatives and fixation techniques. He showed that proteoglycans and polysaccharides of different pK values in their end groups can be differently stained which resulted in the development of Bi-Col procedure (Wolman, 1956). In fact, advances in our understanding of the chemical nature of ground substance remained largely neglected for a generation.

Wolman also studied chemical factors underlying various impregnation procedures for the nervous system. He was also involved in research on demyelination of peripheral nerve sheaths and also showed that black osmium staining light microscopy and its electron density for electron microscopy, appears first in carbohydrates before it stains unsaturated lipids. He also demonstrated the presence of a carbohydrate-containing moiety in myelin (later shown by others to be different proteoglycans) and its importance in myelin breakdown. His research was focused on the oxidation of lipids, the formation of lipid peroxides, their polymerization, and the pathogenesis and nature of lipid pigments.

In 1959, Wolman was appointed head of the Department of Pathology of the Tel Hashomer Government Hospital (later renamed as the Chaim Sheba Medical Center). He continued to study peripheral nerve demyelinization and membrane structures. Using enzyme histochemical methods, he and his coworkers were able to prove that changes in ion concentrations can induce phase changes in cell membranes. Another study dealt with the substance (or substances) called amyloid (Wolman 1971).

Understanding of the chemistry involved in histological techniques enabled Moshe Wolman in the 1950s to determine that the storage disease, that was later named after him is known as Lysosomal Acid Lipase Deficiency or Wolman disease, is caused by accumulation in cells of a mixture of cholesterol and triglycerides and differed substantially from Niemann-Pick Disease. (Wolman, 1989).

Wolman formulated the theory and use of polarization microscopy in routine pathology and diagnostic molecular research. He was one of the first to recognize that polarized light microscopy is a powerful tool, which allows the detection of structures that otherwise be obtained only with great difficulty (Wolman, 1970).

In 1964, Wolman was appointed full professor and head of the Department of Pathology at the newly founded Medical School of Tel Aviv University. In 1967, he was also appointed chair of the Department of Cell Biology and Histology.

Wolman authored more than 200 publications and contributions to books. Over the years, he contributed chapters to many textbooks and served on numerous editorial boards including Histochemie.

He was deeply interested in educational and ethical questions. He published a book on ethics and demagoguery and served as chairperson of the ethics committee of the Israel Medical Association. He was concerned with the issues of medical errors and published a book on the subject together with his daughter, Ruth Manor, "Doctor's Errors and Mistakes of Medicine: Must Health Care Deteriorate?" (2004)