Biography of Robert Koch
Robert Koch (11 December 1843 – 27 May 1910) was a physician and one of the founders of microbiology. He contributed, together with Louis Pasteur, to the understanding of the communicable diseases etiology. Notable were his studies about the anthrax and tuberculosis.
Life
Heinrich Hermann Robert Koch was born on December 11th 1843 in Clausthal in the Harz Mountains, in Germany. The third of thirteen children of Mathilde and Hermann Koch, a mining engineer, Robert Koch early showed unusual intelligence by learning to read on his own when he was only five years old.
Throughout his education path, he has developed a particular interest in the sciences, so he decided to study the natural sciences when he entered the University of Göttingen, Germany. However, a few months later, he decided to change area to study medicine, a course that he concluded in 1866 with distinction and honours.
Following the completion of his studies, Robert Koch was a general practitioner in various German towns and volunteered to serve as a surgeon in the Franco-Prussian War, from 1870 until 1872. At the end of the war and until 1880, he settled as a physician in Wollstein, where, at the same time, he performed the most of his research.
Carbuncle
The demonstration of the direct transmission of Bacillus anthracis (bacterial cause of anthrax) in cattle, by Casimir Davaine, led Robert Koch, despite his work in a doctor’s Office, to join in a study on the Carbuncle (also called anthrax), aiming to prove scientifically that this bacillus was the cause of the disease and to investigate its transmission to Man. Robert Koch was then able to isolate the bacillus from blood samples and to grow it in pure cultures. He found that, although it does not survive long outside the host, Bacillus anthracis developed endospores resistant to adverse conditions and with the ability to persist in the soil a long period of time. After ingestion of pastures contaminated with endospores by the cattle, favourable conditions were resumed and gave rise to new bacillus endospores. The presence of these endospores explained the spontaneous outbreaks of carbuncle in animals that had not contacted with infected animals. In 1876, Robert Koch published his results in the «Botanical Journal», of which he was an editor, and soon he achieved worldwide fame.
Koch’s bacillus
In 1880, Robert Koch was appointed a member of the Imperial Health Department of Berlin and there he could dedicate his time to the development of new techniques of bacteriological cultures, having developed new methods of culture using potato as a solid medium or agar placed in a container invented purposely by his colleague, Richard Petri: the Petri dish. He also developed plating techniques in order to obtain pure cultures, and was the first to isolate bacteria colonies on solid media. Robert Koch was acclaimed by his peers and his techniques considered being ‘ a great progress ‘ for his ‘ rival ‘, Louis Pasteur.
In 1882, he used these new techniques and innovative colouring methods to isolate and identify the etiologic agent of tuberculosis, Mycobacterium tuberculosis, or Koch’s Bacillus. Then, he tried to develop a cure for the disease, which was considered to be the most deadly at this time, using dead tuberculous bacilli, but he had not the success he expected to have. However, his studies have enabled the development of a tuberculin test used, even today, on detection of the disease.
In 1883, when he was still studying tuberculosis, Robert Koch was sent to Egypt to study cholera. There, he identified the bacteria, Vibrio cholerae, that cause the disease. However, he was unaware that the bacteria had already been identified by Italian anatomist Filippo Pacini in 1854, and that, due to the beliefs of the time, his work had been totally ignored.
Next, Robert Koch also participated in the discovery and identification of many other bacteria and emphasizes the importance of water purification as infectious disease prevention.
Koch’s postulates
Throughout his discoveries, Robert Koch developed criteria, called Koch’s postulates (adapted from postulates initially formulated by his mentor, Jakob Henle, at the University of Göttingen), to determine whether a disease was caused by a microorganism or not. According to him, in order to consider a disease to be microbial, each of these four criteria has to be met:
- The microorganism must be present in abundance in sick organisms and absent in healthy organisms.
- The microorganism must be isolated from the sick organism and cultivated in vitro.
- The microorganism should lead to the emergence of the disease when inoculated in a healthy organism.
- The microorganism must be isolated again, from the inoculated organism and be identified as being identical to the original infectious agent.
Even if nowadays we know that all the Koch’s postulates do not always occur, it contributed significantly to the establishment of the microbial theory of disease and remains, even today, at the base of the identification of microbial diseases.
In 1905, Robert Koch was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his contributions in the microbiology area.
He died on May 27th 1910 in Baden-Baden, Germany, victim of a heart attack.
References:
- Boslaugh, S. (2007). Encyclopedia of Epidemiology. Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications. p579-580.
- Merril, R. M. & Timmreck, T. C. (2006). Introduction to Epidemiology. 4th ed. London: Jones & Bartlett Publishers. P30-33.
- Opal, S. M. (2009). A brief history of microbiology and immunology. In: Artenstein, A. W. Vaccines: A Biography. New York: Springer. p44-45.
- Nobel Foundation: http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1905/koch-bio.html
