Leonard Goodwin

Leonard George Goodwin CMG FRS (11 July 1915 – 25 November 2008) was a British protozoologist noted for his work on testing the effectiveness of chemical compounds in treating tropical diseases. He was born in London to a shoe shop manager, and became interested in nature thanks to holidays spent with his grandfather, a gamekeeper, and his uncle, a pharmacist. He was educated at William Ellis School before being accepted into University College London to study botany and zoology. After graduating he went to the College of the Pharmaceutical Society and studied pharmacy, graduating in 1935. He became a demonstrator at the college under J H Burn and at his urging took further degrees in medicine and physiology. The start of World War II saw the College evacuated, leaving Goodwin to find a new job. He started work at the Wellcome Bureau of Scientific Research but was called up for military service with the Royal Tank Regiment soon afterwards. After only a few days of training he was returned to Wellcome to work on tropical diseases, something considered 'vital war work' which excused him from military service. One of the important problems he was dealing with at the time was trying to find a way of preventing troops being infected with leishmaniasis, which was affecting large numbers of troops in Sicily at the time. The standard way of calculating the dosage of drug to give a person was the 'chemotherapeutic index', an index between the minimum dosage to cure an infection and the point at which the drug would kill the patient. Goodwin's attempt at refining the index by testing the drugs on European hamsters failed because they were already resistant to Leishmaniasis; instead he got a scientist in Jerusalem to send him some Syrian hamsters to test the drugs on.The research showed that Pentostam was the least toxic and most effective drug available to treat the disease, and it was issued to troops within a year. Goodwin later claimed that the Syrian hamsters used as pets