Google Doodle: bacteriologist Robert Koch

[lpetrich]

German bacteriologist  Robert Koch (Robert Heinrich Hermann Koch, 11 December 1843 – 27 May 1910) is honored with a Google doodle today.

Trained as a physician, he got into studying infectious organisms, especially infectious bacteria. He ended up discovering the bacteria that cause anthrax (Bacillus anthracis), tuberculosis (Mycobacterium tuberculosis), and cholera (Vibrio cholerae). He also discovered that the anthrax bacterium makes spores for surviving bad conditions for it.

He also noted that immunity to some disease organisms can be acquired.

He proposed what are now called Koch's postulates for identifying disease organisms:

• The organism must always be present, in every case of the disease.
• The organism must be isolated from a host containing the disease and grown in pure culture.
• Samples of the organism taken from pure culture must cause the same disease when inoculated into a healthy, susceptible animal in the laboratory.
• The organism must be isolated from the inoculated animal and must be identified as the same original organism first isolated from the originally diseased host.

Nowadays, they are considered out of date, because they are a poor fit for some organisms, like viruses ( Koch's postulates).

 

[untermensche]

Smallpox vaccine, the first successful vaccine to be developed, was introduced by Edward Jenner in 1796. He followed up his observation that milkmaids who had previously caught cowpox did not later catch smallpox by showing that inoculated cowpox protected against inoculated smallpox.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallpox_vaccine

The idea of acquired immunity was known a while before Koch.