Max Samter

Max Samter (1909 to 1999) was a German-born physician and immunologist who built his career in the United States. He came from a family of doctors, trained at Freiburg, Innsbruck and Berlin, and took his medical degree at the University of Berlin in 1933. As a Jewish doctor under the Nazi regime he was barred from major universities, ran a general practice outside Berlin, and left Germany in 1937 with the help of an appointment arranged through Johns Hopkins University. He worked for years as an unpaid research assistant, served as a medic in the United States Army in the Second World War, and later joined the University of Illinois in Chicago, where he became a full professor in 1961 and directed an allergy and immunology institute at Grant Hospital. There he fully characterized the link between asthma, nasal polyps and aspirin sensitivity, now called Samter's triad or aspirin-exacerbated respiratory disease, although Georges-Fernand Widal had described the association earlier in 1922. He also wrote and edited foundational immunology textbooks, and the research institute he founded was later renamed in his honor.