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Michael Denman, Jim Archer, Viv Winrow, John Holborow (1918–2009), Rheumatology, Volume 48, Issue 12, December 2009, Pages 1622–1623, https://doi.org/10.1093/rheumatology/kep318
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A graduate of Clare College, Cambridge and St Bartholomew's Hospital, London, John Holborow was a member of the scientific staff of the MRC Rheumatism Research Unit at Taplow for most of its 1947–75 history. With Leonard Glynn, he was one of the first scientists to explore the contribution of autoimmunity to rheumatic fever, inflammatory arthritis and systemic CTDs in patients and animal models of autoimmune disease, and with his clinical collaborators, Eric Bywaters and Barbara Ansell, he created a model centre for the scientific basis of investigating patients with rheumatic diseases.
John was prominent in delineating the contribution of the techniques of clinical immunology to the diagnosis and management of patients with rheumatic diseases. With his close colleague Gerald Johnson, he was especially concerned in perfecting the newly introduced techniques of immunofluorescence in routine and research laboratories. Thus, his major publications from Taplow addressed the immunofluorescent staining patterns and antigen specificity of autoantibodies in disease and animal models of autoimmune disease, forming much of the basis for current diagnostic technology. He and his colleagues were the first to describe smooth muscle reactive autoantibodies, an observation that has had important implications for investigating the immunological disturbances in liver disease, viral infections and neoplasia. Although principally concerned with rheumatic disease problems, John also collaborated extensively with dermatology colleagues in defining the autoantibody reactivity associated with gluten sensitivity. Moreover, with Leonard Glynn, John early recognized the crucial role of genetic susceptibility to rheumatic diseases, as their studies on blood group antigen secretion in rheumatic fever testify. Their 1965 book Autoimmunity and Disease presented a then novel concept with clarity and restraint and captures the excitement of the early days of research in autoimmunity.
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