Dr Bill Frankland is a very busy man. A brief run through his diary is enough to make one wince with vicarious exhaustion. His is a world of international conferences, speeches and official dinners. As perhaps the most eminent and senior practitioner in the management and treatment of allergy, he is much in demand.
Last month he was called as an expert witness in a court case involving a careless driver, a wasp sting and an iPhone. (His evidence secured the conviction after persuading the court that the driver could not have been suffering an allergic reaction, as he had claimed.)
Dr Frankland celebrated his 100th birthday yesterday. As busy as ever, he has a paper coming out in a renowned journal in a few months’ time.
Britain’s – perhaps the world’s – oldest active scientist and medical practitioner greets me at the door of his home in central London with an implausible spring in his step. This extraordinary man, born the year that the Titanic sank, and who entered medical school when Stanley Baldwin was prime minister, could pass for a fit 65-year-old. He only gave up driving in 2004.
This is the scientist to whom hay fever sufferers have cause to be grateful: it was he who persuaded Britain’s media to include the pollen count in weather forecasts back in 1961. And, some 60 years ago, he worked alongside Sir Alexander Fleming, the Nobel Prize- winning discoverer of penicillin. Today, he has absolutely no intention of stopping work. “What would I do…?”
What he has done up to now is help revolutionise our understanding of allergy, an affliction that the medical establishment did not always take seriously until relatively recently (Prof Fleming, for example, thought it was nonsense) and is still not entirely understood.
It was Frankland who championed the view that an allergic reaction is due to a malfunctioning immune system. In doing so, he and his colleagues opened up the possibility of radical new treatments for lifelong sufferers by using small doses of an allergen to, in effect, retrain the errant immune system.
Dr Frankland is precise, measured and some of his comments decidedly waspish. His manner is reminiscent of that other near-immortal, Prince Philip. A few years ago, when well into his eighties, Frankland appeared on The Richard & Judy Show to talk about the “epidemic” of allergy. It was a grim experience by his account. “I’d never heard of them to be honest,” he says, “I took an instant dislike to Richard, far too bumptious. And they only paid me £50!”
His career straddled the boundary between the antibiotic and pre-antibiotic eras. When he trained as a doctor in the 1930s, medicine was more or less powerless against diseases such as septicaemia and meningitis. Then came penicillin, and suddenly doctors were empowered as never before to save the lives of tens of thousands of their patients.
In the 1950s, Bill Frankland worked with Prof Fleming at St Mary’s Hospital in Paddington, west London. He predicted (correctly) that even the new wonder drug, which began to be widely used in the late Forties, would cause allergic reactions in some patients. He had wanted to say so in a chapter he had written for Prof Fleming’s latest tome on the subject. “He made me change the sentence. He was wrong, but you can’t really argue with a Nobel Prize winner.”
Frankland has treated royalty, stars – and dictators. “I got a call [in 1979] to see the new president of Iraq, Saddam Hussein. They told me he had an allergy and he was being treated with various desensitising injections. But he wasn’t allergic at all; his problem was that he was smoking 40 cigarettes a day. I told him to stop and if he wouldn’t I would refuse to come and see him again. I don’t think anyone had spoken to him like that before. I heard some time later that he had had a disagreement with his secretary of state for health, so he took him outside and shot him. Maybe I was lucky.”
Certainly luck has played some part in his life. He was born in Sussex into a family that was comfortably off. His mother had had no idea she was expecting twins until his arrival closely followed that of his brother Jack. “I was wrapped up and my cot was a chest of drawers,” he says. His was an idyllic childhood in the Lake District, a lost Britain of horses, Model T Fords clattering along unmade lanes, long walks and helping with the harvest. He attended St Bees School, founded in 1583, before studying medicine at Oxford and St Mary’s Hospital Medical School.
When war was declared, he joined the Royal Amy Medical Corps and was sent to Singapore. On arrival, he tossed a coin with a fellow medic to decide upon the institution where each would work. It was three days before Pearl Harbour on December 7, 1941. Some two months later, on February 15, 1942, the Japanese swept into Singapore. His colleague, who had gone to the Alexandra Hospital to work, died there along with other staff in an orgy of killing by Japanese soldiers armed with bayonets. Frankland survived the invasion but endured ''three-and-a-half years of hell” in an internment camp on Blakang Mati Island (now Sentosa). The POWs initially saw few Japanese guards, he says. Instead it was Sikhs and Koreans, employed by the Japanese, who mostly ran the camp in the early days. In the gruelling tropical heat everyone was starving – “Food, food! You only thought of food” – and suffering from hideous diseases such as beriberi, dengue fever, and dysentry.
After liberation, the Japanese soldier in charge, nicknamed “Shuffleboots” by inmates, blew himself up in a roadside drain. “We always thought it a very appropriate end,” Frankland says. Five days later and so emaciated that even sitting down was painful – “just bones on a hard seat” – Frankland was flown in a convoy of three Dakotas up to Rangoon for rehabilitation and a ship home. The aircraft hit a storm over the mountains of southern Burma, and one didn’t make it.
Yet after 42 months of hardship and violence, and watching his friends die, he refuses to hate the Japanese. “If I hated them it would do me harm but it wouldn’t do them harm, and secondly, I am a Christian and I was taught not to hate.”
In 1946, Bill Frankland began working in the allergy department of St Mary’s, determined to make his field better understood. To that end, he has even experimented on himself – with near fatal consequences – by allowing a South American insect called Rhodnius prolixus to feast on his blood so he could document his own allergic reaction. He survived severe anaphylactic shock: “All I could do was hold up three fingers to indicate the doses of adrenaline the nurse should inject me with,” he says. Even today, allergies remain perplexing. What, for example, can explain the spectacular increase in allergies over the past half-century? Forty years ago, almost no one was allergic to peanuts; now, a severe reaction to the legumes causes a small but significant number of deaths among children.
Dr Frankland thinks there is much to be said for the “hygiene hypothesis”, which argues that failure to expose children to enough pathogens in infancy hinders the development of the immune system. “Allergy is immunity gone wrong. You are not making antibodies against infection; you are making antibodies against allergens,” he says. His advice is not to worry about dirt too much and, if you want a pet, “get a cat or a dog before the child is born”.
Small doses of potential allergens seem to stop potential problem in their tracks, he points out. Peanut allergy is, for example, rare in Israel where nuts are a common weaning food.
Dr Frankland is no stranger to allergy himself – he’s a lifelong hay fever sufferer, which is a painful irony for a man whose love for flowers means he can while away hours in Regents Park. He remains interested in politics and fierce in his support of the NHS, opposing the proposed Coalition reforms which would see control of finances handed over to GPs. “I haven’t met a single person who is in favour,’’ Frankland says. ''GPs cannot be put in charge of these huge sums of money. It’ll lead to private medicine.”
Now he surrounds himself with his four children and 10 grandchildren. Dr Frankland is still looking forward – he is off to yet another conference, in Geneva, shortly – and shows me with pride his paper entitled ''Lysozyme and Fleming’’ which has just been accepted by The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology. Is he surprised to have reached such a great age intact? “Well, it’s something I have always aimed at.”
There are now about 12,000 centenarians in the UK, extraordinary people each and every one of them, but few as extraordinary as Bill Frankland. And for that we should be grateful. Unless, of course, we meet him in court.
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