Wistar Institute

Beginnings

The Wistar Institute of Anatomy and Biology was named for Dr. Caspar Wistar (1761-1818), a prominent Philadelphia physician and chair of the anatomy department at the University of Pennsylvania. He wrote and published the first American textbook on anatomy—A System of Anatomy: Volume 1 (1811), Volume 2 (1814).

To augment his medical lectures and illustrate comparative anatomy, Dr. Wistar began collecting dried, wax-injected, preserved human specimens. Two years prior to his death in 1818, he gave the collection to Dr. William Edmonds Horner, another Philadelphia physician. Dr. Horner expanded the collection, which became known as the Wistar and Horner Museum.

The collection was further expanded by its next curator, Dr. Joseph Leidy, who added animal specimens, fossils and anthropological samples. By the late 1880s, the collection was beginning to show signs of neglect and wear, a problem compounded by a fire in Logan Hall, the University of Pennsylvania building that housed the museum. The Wistar Institute contains the remaining twenty-two brains of eminent physicians and scientists collected by the American Anthropometric Society.

Isaac Jones Wistar

Dr. Wistar's great-nephew, Isaac Jones Wistar (1827-1905) — a prominent Philadelphia lawyer, Civil War brigadier general, and vice president of the Pennsylvania Railroad — founded The Wistar Institute of Anatomy and Biology in 1892. Approached by the University of Pennsylvania about donating to preserve the Wistar and Horner Museum, Gen. Wistar instead decided to fund a new building. His vision soon expanded to create the Wistar Institute, which would sponsor and publish new medical research and "any other work for the increase of original scientific knowledge."

A plot of land was secured, and Wistar hired architects George W. and William G. Hewitt to design the museum/laboratory. The building was dedicated on May 21, 1894. Dr. Horace Jayne served as its director from January 1894 to December 1903.

A bronze bust of Gen. Wistar by sculptor Samuel Murray is exhibited in the Institute's museum. The Institute's original building is a National Register of Historic Places contributing property in the University of Pennsylvania Campus Historic District, and the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission recognized the Wistar Institute of Anatomy and Biology with a state historic marker in 2007.

20th century

At the beginning of the 20th century, The Wistar Institute began to pursue new biomedical research, particularly experimental and investigative biology, under the leadership of Milton Greenman, M.D., and Henry Donaldson, Ph.D.

Between 1908 and 1910, Wistar scientist Helen Dean King, Ph.D., developed and bred the Wistar rat, the first standardized laboratory animal model from which more than half of all laboratory rats today are thought to be descended. The Institute also began publishing scientific journals under the Wistar Press. Between 1905 and 1925, Wistar scientists published 227 original scientific papers, and by 1925, the Institute had solidified its reputation as a center of American biology.

Cancer Research

The Wistar Institute Cancer Center researches prevention, diagnosis and treatment of cancer. The center is organized in three research programs:

The Gene Expression and Regulation Program, focusing on cancer genomics and epigenetics.

The Immunology, Microenvironment and Metastasis Program, focusing on the roles of the tumor microenvironment and the immune system in tumor progression and therapy response.

The Molecular and Cellular Oncogenesis Program, focusing on cancer signaling networks to improve cancer diagnosis and therapy.