Accomplished physician laid to rest in Portales

PORTALES — She will long be known as the woman who cared for “the boy in the bubble.” But history will also remember her as an accomplished medical school professor and physician who experienced major breakthroughs in the treatment of babies’ immunological systems.

Services for Dr. Mary Ann South were held in her hometown of Portales on Saturday.

South was best known as a member of the team of doctors who cared for David Vetter, known as “the boy in the bubble” because of the protective plastic domes in which he lived his entire life.

She died peacefully Nov. 7 in her Portales home, surrounded by family. She was 86.

South was long recognized for her expertise in pediatrics, infectious diseases and pediatric and adult immunology.

During her career, she was involved in major breakthroughs involving how the rubella virus in babies causes immune defects and the differentiation of immune cells, as well as other groundbreaking research.

South was among the doctors treating Vetter, who was born in 1971 with severe combined immunodeficiency, or SCID. During his first years of life, he lived mostly at Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston. Later, he spent more time at home with his parents and older sister in Dobbin, Texas. Even there, he existed in interconnected plastic containment bubbles and could only be touched by special gloves protruding into the walls of his bubble.

Vetter died in 1984, at the age of 12.

In a 2000 interview in the Portales News-Tribune, South said, “I got really attached to David’s family and to David. He was a cheery baby. He had a sunny personality ... just a happy little kid.”

Although South had moved on to other professional positions, she remained close to the boy and his family and was present at the time of his death.

“Cultures of his cells were preserved after his death and the molecular defect was discovered using his cells and those of two other boys with the disease,” South told the newspaper. “Now we have the possibility to do genetic engineering to correct the defect.”

As a result of her early work as well as the work of her colleagues, the overwhelming majority of infants diagnosed with SCID are now successfully treated with bone marrow transplants.

After graduating from Portales High School in 1951, where she was class valedictorian, South attended Eastern New Mexico University, graduating with honors in 1955. She then went to Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, where she received her M.D. in pediatrics in 1959.

South completed her internship at St. Luke’s Hospital in Chicago, a residency in infectious disease at Baylor, and a fellowship in pediatric immunology from the University of Minnesota.

It was during her time as an assistant professor at Baylor College of Medicine that South came to know and help care for Vetter.

Other professional positions took South to Pennsylvania, where she was the director of pediatric immunology at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and professor at the University of Pennsylvania; then to Lubbock, where she worked in the Department of Pediatrics at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center; then as a visiting professor with the National Institutes of Health; and finally as the Kellogg Endowed Professor of Medicine at Meharry Medical College in Nashville, Tennessee, one of the few historically black medical schools in the county.

Albuquerque tax attorney Kendall Schlenker grew up in Portales and was a childhood friend of South’s. They met in seventh grade and attended school together through ENMU, before she went off to medical school and he went off to law school. The two, however, remained friends, he said.

“She had siblings and I had siblings and we all knew each other. It was a small town,” Schlenker said. From the time they were in middle school, he said, South “made clear her intention to become a doctor, and I was pretty clear that I intended to become a lawyer.”

Schlenker said his life-long friend was “scholarly, had a good sense of humor and was outgoing.”

He noted that South published more than 175 research articles, presented numerous lectures to medical societies around the world and was inducted into the Alpha Omega Alpha Honor Medical Society.

In December 1983, South married Allard Loutherback. He died 17 months later, but that provided South with an instant family of children, grandchildren and great grandchildren.

South family members ask that donations be made in South’s name to Camp Good News, the Widow’s Friend, or Doctors Without Borders.