Endre A. Balazs

At the College of Physicians Surgeons of Columbia University between 1975-1985, Dr. Balazs was the Malcolm P. Aldrich Research 

Professor of Ophthalmology and between 1975-1982, he was the Director of The Eye Research Institute. 

We recorded our first conversation in his home in Fort Lee, New Jersey, on March 17, 1999. It was a full-day recording, which was then augmented by a shorter session in Fort Lee in late 2000, and the text was finalized in the summer of 2001. 

There was another influence, a family friend who was a gynecologist. He asked me what I would like to do and I learned from him about the medical profession. By the time I was 15, I decided that I would become a doctor. I had also read Paul de Kruif s Microbe Hunters which was a very popular book, the first of its kind. I wanted to discover things in medicine. From the very beginning I had a goal to cure people by scientific discoveries. 

The very first research project Huzella gave me was to study the intercellular substance between plant cells with the latest histological techniques used in his laboratory. He and his associates were concentrating on the study of the substance between the cells in animal tissues. Their primary interest was collagen, the fibrous, water-insoluble protein that is the main building block of the intercellular substance or intercellular matrix, as we call it today. 

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Endre A. Balazs, Matrix Biology Institute, Edgewater, New Jersey, USA... 

In 1934, Karl Meyer and his colleague John Palmer isolated a previously luiknown chemical substance from the vitreous body of cows eyes. They found that the substance contained two sugar molecules, one of which was uronic acid. For convenience, therefore, they proposed the name hyaluronic acid . The popular name is derived from hyalos , which is the Greek word for glass + uronic acid [8], At the time, they did not know that the substance which they had discovered would prove to be one of the most interesting and usefirl natural macromolecules. HA was first used commercially in 1942 when Endre Balazs applied for a patent to use it as a substitute for egg white in bakery products[9]. 

The term hyaluronan was introduced in 1986 to conform to the international nomenclature of polysaccharides and is attributed to Endre Balazs (Balazs E. A, et al., 1986), who coined it to encompass the different forms of the molecule can take, e.g., the acid form, hyaluronic acid, and the salts, such as sodium hyaluronate, which forms at physiological pH [10], HA was subsequently isolated from many other sources and the physicochemical stracture properties, and biological role of this polysaccharide were studied in numerous laboratories [11]. This work has been summarized in a Ciba Foundation Symposium [12] and a recent review [13]. 

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