WILLIAM TRAGER: 1910–2005

[...]indisputably, Bill Trager's greatest accomplishment occurred in 1976 when he and a young colleague developed a method for the continuous cultivation of the dreaded human malaria pathogen, P. falciparum. Bill's final area of investigation involved development of methodology for culturing P. falciparum outside its host erythrocytes, demonstrating that such axenic cultures could produce merozoites capable of invading erythrocytes and continuing their normal intracellular cycles. In addition to his election to the National Academy of Sciences in 1973, he was a Guggenheim Foundation Fellow, he received an honorary Sc.D. from his alma mater, Rutgers University, and another honorary doctorate degree from the Rockefeller University.