William Trager

William Trager (20 March 1910 – 22 January 2005) was an American parasitologist, professor at Rockefeller University, and member of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States. Trager's research focused on developing microbiological culture systems for a variety of eukaryotic pathogens. He is best known for developing a culture system for the malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum with James Jensen in the 1970s.

Early life and education William Trager was born March 20, 1910, in Newark, New Jersey to Leon and Anna (Emilfork) Trager. In Cleveland's lab, Trager established a culture system for flagellate symbionts of the roach Cryptocercus punctulatus, showing that the roach's ability to digest cellulose was actually due to the cellulases of the symbiotic flagellates.

Career Following his Ph.D., Trager joined the lab of Rudolf Glaser in the Department of Animal and Plant Pathology in the Princeton, New Jersey division of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research as a postdoctoral fellow.

During World War II, Trager served as a captain in the US Army Sanitary Corps supervising clinical trials with the antimalarial atabrine.

In the 1970s Trager and a postdoctoral fellow James B. Jensen performed the work for which Trager is best known: the cultivation of P. falciparum.

Trager also worked sporadically throughout his career on kinetoplastid parasites. He showed that the intracellular stage of Leishmania donovani could be cultured for several days, and established a tsetse fly tissue culture system to grow all the life stages of Trypanosoma vivax.

Awards Trager received many awards over the course of his life. He received honorary degrees from Rutgers University in 1965 and Rockefeller University in 1987.

Trager was president of the Society of Protozoologists from 1960 to 1961, the American Society of Parasitologists from 1973 to 1974, and the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene from 1978 to 1979. In 1973, Trager was elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences.