Everything about Robert Koch totally explained
Heinrich Hermann Robert Koch (
December 11 1843 –
May 27 1910) was a
German physician. He became famous for isolating
Bacillus anthracis (
1877), the
tuberculosis bacillus (
1882) and the
cholera vibrio (
1883) and for his development of
Koch's postulates.
He was awarded the
Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his tuberculosis findings in
1905. He is considered one of the founders of
microbiology - he inspired such major figures as
Paul Ehrlich and
Gerhard Domagk.
Biography
Robert Koch was born in
Clausthal,
Germany as the son of a mining official. He studied medicine under
Friedrich Gustav Jakob Henle at the
University of Göttingen and graduated in 1866. He then served in the
Franco-Prussian War and later became district medical officer in
Wollstein (Wolsztyn),
Prussian Poland. Working with very limited resources, he became one of the founders of
bacteriology, the other major figure being
Louis Pasteur.
After
Casimir Davaine showed the direct transmission of the
anthrax bacillus between cows, Koch studied anthrax more closely. He invented methods to purify the bacillus from blood samples and grow pure cultures. He found that, while it couldn't survive outside a host for long, anthrax built persisting endospores that could last a long time.
These
endospores, embedded in soil, were the cause of unexplained "spontaneous" outbreaks of anthrax. Koch published his findings in 1876, and was rewarded with a job at the Imperial Health Office in
Berlin in 1880. In 1881, he urged the
sterilization of surgical instruments using heat.
In
Berlin, he improved the methods he used in Wollstein, including staining and purification techniques, and bacterial growth media, including
agar plates (thanks to the advice of Angelina and
Walther Hesse) and the
Petri dish, named after its inventor, his assistant
Julius Richard Petri. These devices are still used today. With these techniques, he was able to discover the bacterium causing
tuberculosis (
Mycobacterium tuberculosis) in
1882 (he announced the discovery on
March 24). Tuberculosis was the cause of one in seven deaths in the mid-19th century.
In 1883, Koch worked with a French research team in
Alexandria,
Egypt, studying
cholera. Koch identified the
vibrio bacterium that caused cholera, though he never managed to prove it in experiments. The bacterium had been previously isolated by Italian anatomist
Filippo Pacini in 1854, but his work had been ignored due to the predominance of the
miasma theory of disease. Koch was unaware of Pacini's work and made an independent discovery, and his greater preeminence allowed the discovery to be widely spread for the benefit of others. In 1965, however, the bacterium was formally renamed
Vibrio cholera Pacini 1854.
In 1885, he became professor of
hygiene at the
University of Berlin, and later, in 1891, director of the newly formed Institute of Infectious Diseases, a position which he resigned from in 1904. He started traveling around the world, studying diseases in
South Africa,
India, and
Java.
Probably as important as his work on tuberculosis, for which he was awarded a Nobel Prize (1905), are
Koch's postulates, which say that
to establish that an organism is the cause of a disease, it must be:
- found in all cases of the disease examined
- prepared and maintained in a pure culture
- capable of producing the original infection, even after several generations in culture
- be retrievable from an inoculated animal and cultured again.
After Koch's success the quality of his own research declined (especially with the
fiasco over his ineffective TB cure "
tuberculin"), although his pupils found the organisms responsible for
diphtheria,
typhoid,
pneumonia,
gonorrhoea, cerebrospinal
meningitis,
leprosy,
bubonic plague,
tetanus, and
syphilis, among others, by using his methods.
He died on
27 May 1910 of a
heart-attack in
Baden-Baden, aged 66.
Koch crater on the
Moon was named after him. The
Robert Koch Prize and Medal were created to honour Microbiologists who make groundbreaking discoveries or who contribute to global health in a unique way.
Further Information
Get more info on 'Robert Koch'.
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