Historical Perspectives: Perinatal Profiles: Bengt Robertson: A Pioneer of Surfactant Research

Henry L. Halliday; Christian P. Speer

doi:10.1542/neo.11-9-e471

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Introduction

Bengt Robertson, a Swedish pediatric pathologist, teamed up with his countryman Göran Enhorning, an obstetrician, in the 1960s and 1970s to conduct seminal basic research on surfactant replacement in animal models of respiratory distress syndrome (RDS). This research formed the foundation for the very successful randomized clinical trials of natural surfactant replacement for RDS in the 1980s and 1990s.

The Early Years

Bengt Robertson was born in Stockholm in 1935, just 6 years after another Swede, Kurt van Neergaard, first demonstrated the importance of pulmonary surfactant for normal lung function. (1) Robertson was educated at Södra Latins Gymnasium in Stockholm and graduated from high school in 1953 before studying medicine at the Karolinska Institutet. He graduated as MD in 1960, and in 1968, he successfully defended his PhD thesis entitled “The intrapulmonary arterial pattern in normal infancy and in transposition of the great arteries” at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm. In 1970, he was appointed as a Consultant in Pediatric Pathology at St. Göran's Hospital in Stockholm, and from 1974, he was Director of the Division for Experimental Perinatal Pathology in the Department of Women and Child Health at the Karolinska Institutet.

Early Surfactant Studies

At least two unsuccessful trials of surfactant replacement for RDS in preterm neonates were completed in the 1960s. (2)(3) The surfactant used in these trials was dipalmitoylphosphatidylcholine, and it was administered by aerosolization. Robertson and Enhorning reasoned that natural surfactant administered by direct instillation into the lungs would be …