Robert koch who is who

And yet, it was the work that brought Koch to prominence. The work recounts his study on the causes of traumatic infectious diseases through the inoculation of animals, which he carried out over multiple generations, and, for the first time, demonstrated the specificity of infection.

The organism must be isolated from a host containing the disease and grown in pure culture. Tuberculine, as Koch called it, is still being used for this purpose today. In order to simplify his research, Koch came up with some clever inventions. His discoveries are still used in laboratories all over the world.

He developed a culture medium based on agar for bacteria to grow on. Also axenic culturing, a method to grow large amounts of clones of one single bacterium, is an invention of Koch. Microbiology at home Robert Koch studied medicine and had a great interest in medical research. Prove it. They are: The micro-organism has to be found in abundance in all organisms human, animal or plant suffering from the disease, but not in healthy organisms. The son of a mining engineer, he demonstrated a gifted mind at an early age, reportedly announcing to his parents at age 5 that he had taught himself to read by using newspapers.

In , Koch enrolled at the University of Gottingen to study medicine. Among his influential professors was Jacob Henle, a leading anatomist and proponent of the germ theory of disease. After earning his medical degree in , Koch worked as a hospital assistant. He passed the district medical officer's examination, and by he began volunteering for medical service in the Franco-Prussian war. In , he became district medical officer for Wollstein, where he began compiling the research on bacteria that would make him famous.

In , Koch announced that he had developed a cure for tuberculosis, called tubercilin. This prompted patients and physicians alike to travel to Berlin, and for Koch to take on a new role as director of the new Institute for Infectious Diseases.

However, the so-called cure was soon revealed to have little therapeutic value, damaging Koch's reputation in the medical community. While correct that the bacilli causing bovine TB was different, he was ultimately proven wrong in his belief that it had little effect on humans and that no public measures were needed to purge infected livestock.

Long harboring a love for travel, Koch spent much of the remaining 15 years of his life visting foreign countries to embark on new research. In the late s he traveled to Rhodesia South Africa to help stem an outbreak of rinderpest, and he followed with stops in other parts of Africa and India to study malaria, surra and other diseases. After stepping down as director of the Institute for Infectious Disease — later renamed the Koch Institute — in , Koch returned to Africa to study trypanosomiasis sleeping sickness and visited relatives in the U.

He died of heart disease on May 27, , in Baden-Baden, Germany. Although others had earlier determined that germs cause disease — notably Pasteur and Joseph Lister — Koch was the first to link a specific bacterium, in this case bacillus anthracis , to a specific disease. Koch learned that dyes helped to make bacteria visible and identifiable under the microscope, and published the first photographs of bacteria.

Tuberculosis was then responsible for one in seven deaths in Europe. Culturing the bacilli was difficult, but Koch eventually succeeded in growing them on coagulated blood serum, and found that inoculating animals with the bacilli caused tuberculosis.