Biographical Feature. John C. Sherris, M.D. John C. Sherris is pioneer in clinical microbiology who has made fundamental

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1 JCM Accepts, published online ahead of print on 12 September 2012 J. Clin. Microbiol. doi: /jcm Copyright 2012, American Society for Microbiology. All Rights Reserved. 1 Biographical Feature 2 John C. Sherris, M.D John C. Sherris is pioneer in clinical microbiology who has made fundamental contributions to the development of accurate and reproducible antibiotic susceptibility testing methods. His innovative and collaborative work made antibiotic susceptibility testing easy, reliable, standardized, and inexpensive, thus improving the care of countless patients. Dr. Sherris received his medical education at the University of London, completing his undergraduate medical degree in 1944 and his graduate medical degree in He did advanced training at the University of London and received a doctoral degree in Pathology with Bacteriology as the principle subject in Dr. Sherris has board certification in Microbiology from the American Board of Microbiology and in Medical Microbiology from the American Board of Pathology. He is a Fellow of The Royal College of Pathologists in the United Kingdom. Dr. Sherris s initial hospital appointments were at the King Edward VII Hospital, the Central Laboratory at the Ministry of Health in England, the Ayesbury and District Laboratory, and at the Radcliff Infirmary at Oxford. He joined the faculty of the University of Manchester, England, in In 1959, Dr. Sherris became an Associate Professor in the Department of Microbiology at the University of Washington in Seattle. He rose to the rank of professor in 1963 and he is currently Professor Emeritus. At the University of Washington, he was the Director of the Clinical Microbiology Laboratories until 1970, when he became the Chairman of the Department of Microbiology and Immunology, a position he held for the next decade. Dr. Kenneth Ryan, who has known Dr. Sherris since 1964, says that John s success as a leader was

2 22 23 a product of the absolute trust that students, faculty, and administrators had in his judgment and integrity. His charm didn t hurt Dr. Sherris began his research on antimicrobials in the late 1940s in collaboration with Dr. Mary Ethel Florey, who was a member of the team at Oxford that developed penicillin for clinical use. He developed new methods for testing antibiotic susceptibilities of the bacteria isolated from patients treated with penicillin and streptomycin in Dr. Florey s studies. Dr. Sherris soon realized that susceptibility results were very much dependent upon the method of testing, thereby making comparisons between different studies or institutions challenging because of differences in practices. Improving methods of antibiotic susceptibility testing became a focus of Dr. Sherris s research at the University of Washington. There, he collaborated with several investigators to develop and validate disk diffusion susceptibility testing. Their technique was summarized in a classic paper published in 1966 in the American Journal of Clinical Pathology by Drs. Bauer, Kirby, Sherris and Turck (1); this paper has been cited over 6,000 times (SCI). Their method provided a means of reproducible antibiotic susceptibility testing that could be used by nearly any clinical laboratory. The technique described in this paper became the basis for the disk diffusion methods published by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 1972 (2) and by the National Committee for Clinical Laboratory Standards (now the Clinical and Laboratory Standards Institute) in 1975 (3). Dr. Sherris continued this line of work as a member of a World Health Organization (WHO) International Collaborative Study on Antibiotic Sensitivity Testing. Along with Dr. Hans Ericsson, who had performed similar research in Sweden, Dr. Sherris

3 published a report from the WHO on this project in 1971 (4). Dr. Sherris published several subsequent papers in which methods for antibiotic susceptibility testing were further validated and improved. He also studied methods of bacterial identification, automation in clinical microbiology, and the epidemiology and mechanisms of antibiotic resistance. A representative selection of his research publications is provided below. Dr. Sherris has received many honors, including an Honorary Doctor of Medicine for the Karolinska Institute. The American Society of Microbiology (ASM) has recognized his achievements with the Becton-Dickinson Award for outstanding research, and by selecting him to give the Alex Sonnenwirth Memorial Lecture and the Clinical Microbiology Divisional Lectures. He also received the Professional Achievement Award from the American Boards of Medical Microbiology and Medical Laboratory Immunology. Dr. Sherris has generously given his time in service to clinical microbiology by serving in leadership positions in several professional organizations. He was the President of the ASM and the Chairman of the ASM Honors Committee. Dr. Sherris was the Chairman of the American Board of Medical Microbiology, which certifies the expertise of doctoral microbiologists to direct public health and clinical microbiology laboratories. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology of the ASM, and has served on its Board of Governors both as a member and the Vice-Chairman. Dr. Sherris has been a member of the editorial boards of the Journal of Infectious Diseases and Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy, a Section Editor of the Manual of Clinical Microbiology and the Founding Editor and Editor-in-Chief of the ASM Cumitech series.

4 Dr. Sherris has influenced the lives of many microbiologists and physicians through education. He led curriculum reform at the University of Washington Medical School from 1965 to 1968 that brought an emphasis on medical concepts and interdisciplinary teaching to medical education, something many medical schools continue to work towards. He founded a leading textbook, Medical Microbiology: An Introduction to Infectious Diseases, published in This book stands out for its emphasis on the clinical relevance of microbiology. It is now titled Sherris Medical Microbiology and is in its fifth edition. A trainee in his laboratory, Dr. Tom O Brien, points out how Dr. Sherris s keen and sometimes irreverent sense of irony makes him especially insightful about medical education. Asked once what long service on the curriculum committee had taught him about what medical students want the curriculum to be, his distillation was: The opposite of what it was last year. Dr. Sherris is truly an outstanding model for clinical microbiologists. He has combined research of the highest quality and clinical importance with leadership in both the profession and in education. Dr. Laurence Drew, who trained with Dr. Sherris, recently said that he set the standards so high for himself that you struggled to do the same. He has a wonderful sense of humor, often self-deprecating, and a deep concern for family and the world. 81 Selected Bibliography Sherris JC, Florey ME Relation of Penicillin Sensitivity in Staphylococci to Clinical Manifestations of Infection. Lancet. 260:

5 84 85 Fairbrother RW, Sherris JC The Dried Disc Technique for Bacterial Sensitivity Tests. Assoc. Clinical Pathol. Broadsheet, No Shurtleff DB, Peterson W, Sherris JC Systemic Candida tropicalis Infection Treated with Amphotericin. New Engl. J. Med. 169: Dunsmoor CL, Pim KL, Sherris JC Observations of the Inactivation of Chloramphenicol by Chloramphenicol-Resistant Staphylococci. Antimicrob. Agents Chemother. 161: Barry AL, Caudill RG, Sherris JC Comparison of Methods of Inoculating Antibiotic Disc Sensitivity for Rapidly Growing Pathogens. Antimicrob. Agents Chemother. 10: Ronald AR, Eby J, Sherris JC The Susceptibility of Neisseria gonorrhoeae to Penicillin and Tetracycline. Antimicrob. Agents Chemother. 8: Sherris JC Changing Undergraduate Curricula and Their Relationships to Postgraduate Education. Arch. Dermatol. 99: Traub WH, Sherris JC Studies on the Interactions Between Serum Bactericidal Activity and Antibiotic in vitro. Chemotherapy. 15: Bulger RJ, Larson E, Sherris JC Decreased Incidence of Resistance to Antimicrobial Agents Among Escherichia coli and Klebsiella. Ann. Intern. Med. 72: Brenner VC, Sherris JC The Influence of Different Media and Bloods on the Results of Diffusion Antibiotic Susceptibility Tests. Antimicrob Agents Chemother. 1:116.

6 Reller LB, Schoenknecht FD, Kenny MA, Sherris JC Antibiotic Susceptibility Testing of Pseudomonas aeruginosa: Selection of Control Strain and Criteria for Magnesium and Calcium Content in Media. J. Infect. Dis. 130: Lampe MF, Aitken CL, Dennis PG, Forsythe PS, Patrick KE, Schoeknecht FD, Sherris JC Relationship of Early Readings of Minimal Inhibitory Concentrations to the Results of Overnight Tests. Antimicrob. Agents Chemother. 8: Colvin HJ, Sherris JC Electrical Impedance Measurements in the Reading and Monitoring of Broth Dilution Susceptibility Tests. Antimicrob. Agents Chemother. 12:1-66. Barry AL, Schoenknecht FD, Shadomy S, Sherris JC, Thornsberry C, Washington JA, Kammer RB Interpretive Criteria for Cefamandole and Cephalothin Disc Diffusion Susceptibility Tests. Antimicrob. Agents Chemother. 15: Lampe MF, Minshew BH, Sherris JC In vitro Responses of Enterobacter to Ampicillin. Antimicrob. Agents Chemother. 16: Gootz TD, Jackson DB, Sherris JC The Development of resistance to cephalosporin In Clinical Strains of Citrobacter spp. Antimicrob. Agents Chemother. 25: Sherris JC, Ryan KJ, Ray GC, Plorde JJ, Corey L, Spizizen J (ed) Medical Microbiology: An Introduction to Infectious Disease, 1st ed. Elsevier, New York, NY. 119 Alexander J. McAdam 120 Editor, Journal of Clinical Microbiology

7 121 References Bauer AW, Kirby WMM, Sherris JC, Turck M Antibiotic susceptibility testing by a standardized single disk method. Am. J. Clin. Pathol. 45: Federal Register Rules and Regulations. Antibiotic Susceptibility Disks. Fed. Regist. 37: National committee for Clinical Laboratory Standards Performance Standards for Antimicrobial Disk Susceptibility Tests: Approved Standard M2-A7. NCCLS, Villanova, PA. 4. Ericsson HM, Sherris JC Antibiotic Sensitivity Testing- Report of an International Collaborative Study. Acta. Pathol. Microbiol. Scand. S217:1-90

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