Dr. Tevis Goldhaft passed away on July 20 shortly after celebrating his 95th birthday. Dr. Goldhaft was a 1935 graduate of the College of Veterinary Medicine at Cornell University. From 1928 onwards he worked with his father, a poultry veterinarian located in Vineland, NJ, performing tube agglutination tests for Pullorum disease and providing service to the then intensive egg industry of the state.
In 1935 he established Vineland Laboratories to manufacture pox and laryngotracheitis vaccines developed by Dr. Fred Beaudette under a royalty agreement with the New Jersey College of Agriculture. Their company installed the first lyophilizing equipment for poultry vaccines and in 1939 pioneered egg propagation of viral vaccines including the first live attenuated Newcastle Disease product incorporating the La Sota strain. In 1939 Dr. Goldhaft was joined by his sister, Dr. Helen Wernicoff and her husband Dr. Nathan Wernicoff both of whom graduated from Cornell in the mid-1930s.
Vineland Laboratories was expanded in the early 1950s with plants in Mexico, Israel and the UK. The plant in Israel eventually was acquired by ABIC then a subsidiary of TEVA but now part of Phibro Animal Health. In 1970 Vineland Laboratories was acquired by the Damon Corporation but Dr. Goldhaft continued as Chief Operating Officer until his retirement in 1975. Vineland Laboratories was incorporated into Lohmann Animal Health in 2000.
Dr. Goldhaft was instrumental in advancing the health and productivity of the U.S. poultry industry and made considerable contributions to poultry production world-wide through his innovations in vaccine development.
