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Over two generations ago, the distinguished Amer
ican thinker Josiah Royce wrote: “Youphilosophize
when you reflect critically upon what you are doing
in your world. And what you are doing, of course,
is living. And living involves passions, faith, doubts and courage.― I shall try to convey the life and times of George V. Taplin, much loved and admired by his friends and colleagues, both at home and abroad, a great innovator who very early saw the potential
applications of radioactive tracers in medicine and
who has devoted nearly three decades to the inven
tion and development of new radiopharmaceuticals
and procedures in nuclear medicine.
Tappy was born in Rochester, N.Y., in 1910, 3
years before Fritz Paneth and George V. Hevesy
submitted two papers to the Vienna Academy of
Sciences on the use of radioelements as indicators
in analytical chemistry. Hevesy had been given the
task of separating radioactive lead from stable lead, an impossible assignment that he parlayed into the
Nobel Prize by inventing the tracer concept. Tappy's
father was a Canadian physician descended from one of the sons of Colonel Rufus Taplin of the Massa chusetts militia. During the American revolution sev
eral of the Colonel's 21 children left for Canada,
while others remained with the colonists. After gradu
ating from McGill Medical School, Tappy's father moved to Rochester, N.Y. Unfortunately he died when Tappy was 3 years old.
Tappy began thinking about being a doctor when
he was 12. He was influenced greatly by his dentist
uncle, Harold Bowman, who had been like a father to him, and by his father's partner, a surgeon named Thomas Jamison. Tappy did not make up his mind
until he was 17, and it was not an easy decision.
Music has always played an important part in his
life. He studied violin and viola for 5 years at the
Eastman School of Music in Rochester and has
played the trumpet since he was 14 years old. He remains a card-carrying member of the Rochester
Musicians Union, which he joined in high school
in order to play in dance bands. He worked his way through high school, college, and medical school by
playing the trumpet. To him music was an avocation
and a means toward his vocation as a physician. He ended his career as a professional musician when
he became an intern at the University of Rochester,
although he picked up his trumpet again in the Army
during World War II. Today he plays the trumpet
once a month as a charter member of a Dixieland
band made up of eight friends who have played
together for over I 5 years. Their high point each
504 JOURNAL OF NUCLEAR MEDICINE
NUCLEAR MEDICINE
PIONEER CITATION—
GEORGE V. TAPLIN, M.D.
By Henry N. Wagner, Jr.
year is when they perform for the Wives Club of the
UCLA Medical School faculty at the Bel Air Coun
try Club.
Tappy's mother was a schoolteacher who grew
up on a farm. She was a religious person and a dis
ciplinarian. Although Tappy himself is not formally
religious, having dissociated himself from his strict
Presbyterian upbringing when he left high school, the
ethical standards ingrained in him by his mother have
stayed with him throughout his life. From his uncle
and his father's physician friends, Tappy developed
his love of independence; from his mother he learned
perseverance and determination to achieve his full potential.
Tappy decided to become a doctor in 1927, the
year Lindberg flew from New York to Paris. It was
also the year in which Blumgart and Weiss first per
formed their studies of the velocity of the circulation
with radon solutions, the first radioactive studies in
man, preceding by over a decade the use of radio
active tracers in the study of the human thyroid and
by 7 years the discovery of artificial radioactivity.
Tappy attended Union College in Schenectady,
N.Y., an excellent college known especially for its
superior program in engineering. History and Eng
lish were his favorite subjects there, although he also
liked chemistry, biology, and comparative anatomy.
In his own words, he was not a “superstudent,―but
liked to figure things out for himself. Surprisingly, his worst subject was bacteriology, a discipline that
was to lead him into a lifetime of biomedical re
search. Tappy remembers well his chemistry teacher in
college, a Dr. Ellery, who influenced many of his
students to become doctors. After graduating from
Union, Tappy went to the University of Rochester
School of Medicine, where he came under the in
fluence of George Berry, then Professor of Bacteri
ology at Rochester and later Dean at Harvard, Wil
11am McCann, Professor of Medicine, and George
Whipple, the Nobel Laureate who was then Dean of
the Medical School at Rochester. McCann was inter
ested primarily in renovascular hypertension, which
started the fermentation in Tappy's mind that led to
his subsequent pioneering development of Hippuran
renography.
As early as his residency at Strong Memorial Hos
pital in Rochester we can see characteristics that have
persisted throughout his career. He concentrates on
applied rather than basic research. Stimulated by
giants such as George Whipple and George Berry,
he attacked the number one disease of the time,
pneumococcal pneumonia, which was, to quote
Tappy, “captainof the men of death.―In those days,
pneumonia was as serious a problem as heart dis
ease and cancer are today. The mortality from pneu
monia was 40% in general and 80% in the ward
population of Strong Memorial Hospital, and the
wards were full of these patients. A new treatment
specific antisera—had been introduced just as he was
starting his internship. It required isolation of the infecting organism and determination of which of 32
possible serologic types was present. This required
hours of laborious observation of swelling of the pneumococcal capsule. Tappy set out to speed up the process. By concentration techniques, he was able to reduce the procedure to 20 minutes and, again to quote him, “tosee before my eyes the mortality
fall to 5% .“On January 12, 1939, he was given a
prize by the Rochester Academy of Medicine for his
medical thesis entitled, “RevisedTechnique for the
Laboratory Diagnosis and Control of Serum Therapy in Pneumonia.― This pattern has been repeated often throughout
his career: selection of a major problem, dissatisfac
tion with existing methods, creative insight into a possible solution, laborious efforts, and finally recog nition of his success. He was so successful that as an assistant resident in medicine he was placed in
charge of the infectious disease ward and the bac
teriology department at Strong Memorial Hospital. An article in the Rochester newspaper of January 22, 1941 , stated: “Thebright hope of further reduc
tion in deaths from pneumonia in 1941 shone before
Rochester residents today. Physicians held out that hope last night at a Pneumonia Institute at the Acad emy of Medicine... Dr. George V. Taplin pointed out that gains were particularly impressive in treat ment of children and infants suffering from the dis ease... Dr. Taplin explained that the physician has two strings to his bow.― He was referring to
serum and the other new approach, sulfaniliamide
treatment.
For 3 years after medical school Tappy spent much
of his time in pneumonia research at Strong Memorial
Hospital; he then decided to go into practice. His
first day in practice he was referred 15 patients with
pneumonia because of his reputation as the expert in the treatment of pneumococcal pneumonia. He practiced for 3 years as a consultant in internal mcdi
cine while retaining a part-time faculty position at
the University of Rochester. In 1942, he joined the United States Army. Because of his extensive back
ground in infectious diseases, he was sent to Michi
gan to learn about malaria. He thought that he was
headed for the Pacific theater but was shocked to
find himself on a boat headed for England. A typical
snafu, he thought, a term widely used during World
Volume 16, Number 6 505
the tracheal distribution of radioiodinated bacteria
the same year it was invented.
Tappy soon changed his opinion and in 1964 re
ported the use of suspensions of radioalbumin aggre
gates for photoscanning the liver, spleen, lung, and
other organs. In 1966 Tappy returned to his first
love, inhalation of aerosols, and reported the use of
radioaerosol inhalation in lung scanning. He has con
tinued to make important research and clinical con
tributions, primarily in the field of lung, liver, and
kidney, his most recent contribution being a com
parison of the relative roles of inhalation, xenon,
and perfusion lung imaging.
I shall not dwell on these, since they are all well
known. I would rather ask : What makes Tappy tick?
How has he been able to accomplish so much? These
are difficult questions to answer, but it is fun to try.
Clearly he fits the model of the explorer-adventurer
pioneer-researcher. He is resourceful: for example,
he used a bicycle pump to aerosolize particles and
a kitchen microwave oven to aggregate albumin par
tides. He is unwilling to be satisfied with the status
quo: he did not like sitting up all night typing pneu
mococci. He is willing to take risks: he went to the
new medical school at UCLA 4 years before the first
students arrived. He loves freedom : he works pri
manly in a research institute, but makes certain
that patients are always available, at both Harbor
General and University Hospitals of UCLA. He re serves enough time for carrying out his research, limiting his administrative duties even now to 25% of his time. He accepts responsibility toward his field:
during his Presidency of the Society of Nuclear Mcdi
cine he achieved major gains in smoothing the trans
fer of regulatory control from the AEC to the FDA.
He is rich in ideas, considerate of his students,
friends, and colleagues, and versatile in bridging
many disciplines, from infectious diseases to nuclear
physics. He is always humble. Curiosity, inventive
ness, dissatisfaction with present technology, and
dedication to work have been his major character
istics. He has lived up to his New England forebears in declaring: “Iwant to know. I want to improve. I want to help.― Instead of accepting things as they
are, he gets to work to improve them. He has worked
steadily to realize his idea that technology can help
sick people. He shares the qualities of all great sci
entists and inventors, with poets and artists, who
exercise gifts of penetrating insight and ingenuity. Much of his productivity in research has been due to his variety of experience. He loves to travel, another
manifestation of his curiosity and friendliness. He
has friends and admirers all over the world.
For all these reasons, Tappy has been chosen to
receive the Nuclear Medicine Pioneer Citation of the Society of Nuclear Medicine for 1975.
Volume 16, Number 6 507
