Sonja Buckley, 86; Microbiologist Helped Isolate the Lassa Virus
Dr. Sonja Buckley, 86, a Yale microbiologist who helped identify the potentially deadly Lassa virus, died Feb. 2 in a Baltimore nursing home after a series of strokes.
A native of Zurich, Switzerland, the former Sonja Grob earned her medical degree at the University of Zurich, where she taught microbiology and married pathologist Dr. John J. Buckley. Moving to the United States in 1947, she worked at Johns Hopkins University and the Sloan-Kettering Institute before joining the Rockefeller Foundation virus laboratories in 1957. The labs were transferred to Yale in 1964 as the Arbovirus Research Unit.
Buckley’s breakthrough research occurred in 1969. The virus she helped discover is named for the Nigerian village where two missionary nurses died and a third contracted a fever but survived and was flown to New York for treatment. Buckley studied the nurse’s blood along with Dr. Wilbur Downs and Dr. Jordi Casals-Ariet, who contracted Lassa fever. He survived, but Juan Roman, a laboratory technician on their team, died of the virus.
Because of the risk of spreading the disease, their research was transferred from Yale to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.
After Buckley and the others isolated the virus, still prevalent in Nigeria, Liberia and Sierra Leone, treatment using the antiviral drug ribavirin was developed.
