ACCEPTANCE OF THE SPECIAL AWARD By Victor R. Wheatley, Ph.D. I AM CONSCIOUS of the honor paid to me by this SOCIETY in selecting me as recipient of this year's Special Award. I am still a little bewildered and the whole proceedings have an air of unreality but if I am dreaming, I hope that I do not wake up. I am grateful to Dr. Allan Lorincz for acting, so ably, as my eulogist. His remarks about me have been most flattering, though I am not sure that they are entirely true. I became interested in the experimental investigation of the skin just fourteen years ago when I accepted an appointment at St. Bartholomew's Hospital in London as skin biochemist. This appointment I accepted with some reluctance since, at that time, I knew little about the skin and failed to see what an interesting field of study it could provide. The fact that I am still working in this field is evidence enough of the fascination of this complex organ. Most of my work in this field has been concerned with the lipids of the skin. Our first publication on this subject appeared about twelve years ago in, perhaps significantly, an American journal. This was greeted by a number of requests for reprints, a large proportion of which came from the cosmetic houses of this country. At first we were a little surprised since our primary interest was in dermatology but the sciences of dermatology and of cosmetology overlap so much that it is almost impossible to do basic research on the skin whi.ch does not make contributions to both fields of study. Through the ensuing years the interest of the cosmetic chemists in our investigations grew and in 1956 I wrote reviews of our work for two of the leading cosmetic journals. As I said before, my major field of interest was the lipids of the skin, more specifically the chemical nature and function of sebum. This proved to be an exceedingly complex substance and many years had to be spent in the purely chemical investigation of its composition and in the develop- ment of methods for the analysis of this material. One result of these early investigations was the demonstration of squalene as a normal com- ponent of sebum. This observation had far reaching consequences since it reawakened interest in the biological function of squalene which led di- rectly to the establishment of its role as an intermediate in the biosynthesis of cholesterol. 315

316 JOURNAL OF THE SOCIETY OF COSMETIC CHEMISTS In much of our work we had only milligram amounts of lipids available for chemical analysis. The search for methods with which to study these small amounts of material led me very early to utilize the technique of gas chromatography. In the early stages of this work I had the privilege of working in close association with Dr. A. T. James and our application to sebum was among the very first applications of this method to the study of naturally occurring fats. The applications of this technique to many fields of cosmetic chemistry in recent years have been so numerous that it is difficult to realize that it is little more than six years ago since these first analyses of sebum fatty acids were performed. In those days the commer- cial equipment available was of inferior design so the worker had no choice but to build his own. This meant spending perhaps a year in the construc- tion and testing of equipment this is a luxury few workers can afford today, but it is an invaluable experience and, even now, I know of no better ap-. proach to the study and utilization of the methods of gas chromatography. My work on sebum continued in England until 1957 by then it became apparent that it was not going to be possible to obtain adequate financial support there for specialized research on the skin. In the fall of that year, with the help of Dr. Stephen Rothman, I came to this country and spent two memorable years working in his laboratory in Chicago. There we continued the studies of the skin lipids in which Dr. Rothman has been actively interested for many years. His work is well known to you and the excellent equipment available in his laboratories as well as his able criticism added a great stimulus to my work. In Chicago we studied the nature of the epidermal lipids and the formation of vitamin D by the skin as well as continuing the study of the surface and sebaceous gland lipids. Later we studied the mechanisms of lipogenesis by the skin using the excellent tech.- nique of perfusion of isolated dog skin. I left Dr. Rothman for California where I spent a rather prolonged vaca- tion studying other aspects of the skin, in particular the nucleic acids. Fascinating as these studies are, they have failed to eclipse my interest in the lipids of the skin, so once again I find myself returning to my former in- terest. This does not imply that I regard the lipids as providing the an- swer to all the problems of the skin, but rather that they provide a fasci- nating field of study and one which will provide some of the answers to these problems. After all the skin has three main biochemical functions: the secretion of sweat, the formation of keratin and the synthesis of lipids so that in studying the latter we are concentrating on a significant portion of the functional activity of the skin. Many problems still remain to be solved. Th.e mechanisms of lipogenesis by the skin are only just beginning to be understood. The role played by these lipids in the diseased processes of the skin and in maintaining the normal healthy skin has still to be eluci- dated. So that I expect to be busily engaged in these studies for several