The relationship between Parker, who worked for the State of Montana, and Dr. Roscoe Spencer, who was the Public Health Service officer in charge of the laboratory, was an arrangement that worked despite of its awkwardness. Spencer developed the vaccine in the Hygienic Laboratory (precursor to the National Institutes of Health) in Washington, D.C., but more tests and then production of the vaccine occurred in the Canyon Creek Schoolhouse laboratory, which was run by Parker when Spencer wasn’t there. It was the production of the vaccine that led to the construction of a building especially designed for scientific work and which replaced the schoolhouse in 1928.
Parker and Spencer collaborated on studies of other diseases as well. Tularemia and its transmission were another of Parker’s passions, whether it was transmitted by ticks, deer flies, or the pathogen Pasteurella tularensis which he found in ground water. He also studied Q fever, a bacterial infection that can cause heart valve problems, and which is often transmitted by breathing in contaminated air around infected animals such as livestock. Plague was first reported in Montana under Parker.
In 1930, the whole operation became part of the U.S. Public Health Service, and Parker became director of the Rocky Mountain Laboratories. Choosing the right people for the job was one of Parker’s talents as an administrator. He convinced Dr. Herald Cox to join the laboratory to try to make producing the vaccine easier than requiring many stages of tick feedings. Cox lived up to Parker’s expectations by developing a way to grow the pathogen in chick embryos instead. This method is still used in the preparation of many vaccines. Dr. Mason Hargett was also enticed to the laboratory by Parker just before World War II. Yellow fever could have become a terrible problem for U.S. troops during the war, but Hargett and the Rocky Mountain Laboratories produced a vaccine that erased that national security concern.
When Parker died unexpectedly in 1949, he left behind contributions in many areas of tick and other insect transmitted diseases. For example, in 1937, he discovered a rickettsia (a group of small bacteria that cause various diseases in people and are transmitted through insect bites) isolated from the Gulf Coast tick, Amblyomma maculatum. This bacterium, which is also a cause of a spotted fever, was characterized as a unique Rickettsial species in 1965 and named Rickettsia parkeri in honor of its discoverer. That’s a fitting tribute for a person who increased our knowledge about insect-borne diseases so much.
“Ralph R. Parker,” Victor Haas, Science Magazine, Vol 111, January 20, 1950, page 56-57.
