Frank J. Dixon was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, on 9 March 1920 and entered the University of Minnesota in 1937. After 2 years of undergraduate study, he entered medical school there, and, by 1943, he had received his BS, MS and MD degrees. From 1943 to 1946 he served in the medical core of the Marines in the Pacific Theater. Thereafter he spent 2 years as a research assistant at Harvard Medical School's Department of Pathology and was an instructor at the Washington University School of Medicine from 1948 to 1951. In 1951, at the age of 30, he became Chair of the Department of Pathology at the University of Pittsburgh, a position he held for 10 years before heading west to La Jolla, California, to found the Department of Experimental Pathology and a research institute at the Scripps Clinic.
Devoting the initial phase of his career toward understanding the nature of antibody formation and antigen-antibody relationships and interactions, Dixon developed techniques to tag proteins and other molecules with radioactive iodine, a procedure still in use today. This method enabled researchers to map and follow the progress of such molecules through the body to their final location, where their concentrations could be measured. As a result, such antigen-antibody immune complexes and the inflammatory mediators they activated could be identified and linked with the diseases they caused.
