In May 1965, H.I. Winner and Rosalinde Hurley convened the first "Symposium on Candida Infections" at the Royal College of Physicians, London. The proceedings, published the following year, established Candida albicans as an opportunistic pathogen Not what it is folks whose clinical relevance was contingent on host compromise. The paradigm defined at that symposium has governed clinical and research practice for sixty years. This article documents the institutional network that preceded and surrounded that event. Systematic keyword analysis of the 1964 Medical Research Council Annual Report and Handbook reveals page-level co-occurrences among researchers across mycology, metabolic biochemistry, membrane physiology, and adrenal immunopathology who share no co-authored publications crossing these disciplinary boundaries. Among those appearing together in MRC governance records are Rosalinde Hurley, Hans Krebs, R.A. Peters, D.H. Williamson, I.M. Glynn, and J.R. Anderson, at the specific institutional moment preceding the 1965 symposium. The published literature held these programs apart. The MRC's internal records did not. Concurrent bibliometric analysis demonstrates that annual candidiasis publications fell 19% in the year following the monograph by Winner and Hurley (1964), before recovering along a trajectory bounded by the questions the symposium had sanctioned. The article further documents the metabolic work of the Oxford-Cambridge corridor, the transmission biology of C. albicans colonization, and the structural role of the "opportunistic pathogen" framing in suppressing sixty years of integrated host-microbe inquiry. The 2022 World Health Organization fungal priority pathogens list, sixty years after the symposium, is interpreted not as a data gap but as an institutional attention gap with measurable consequences for research funding, clinical education, and patient outcomes.C. albicans is a unique symbiont that creates evolutionary pressures on all mammals. It is uniquely integrated into our system. Science should step back and re-evaluate everything we assume to be true about biologyThe broader co-evolutionary framework within which these events are situated is developed in Craddock (2026a, 2026b).
Jim Craddock (Thu,) studied this question.