- Person
- Paul Ehrlich
- Lived
- 1854–1915
- Field
- Immunology & chemotherapy
- From
- German
The story
Paul Ehrlich met Robert Koch early. As a medical student in Breslau he attended Koch's presentation there, from 30 April to 2 May 1876, of his work on the life cycle of the anthrax germ. By 1882 Koch was working at the Imperial Public Health Office in Berlin, and Ehrlich, an assistant at the Charité hospital, had become an expert on the chemistry of dyes.
On 24 March 1882 Koch gave a historic lecture in Berlin announcing that he had identified the bacterium that causes tuberculosis. Ehrlich was in the audience and later called it his greatest experience in science.
He went straight to work. By the next day he had already improved Koch's method for staining the tuberculosis bacillus, using his deep knowledge of dyes to make the organism stand out clearly under the microscope. Koch welcomed the improvement without reservation, and from then on the two men were bound in friendship. Ehrlich published his method later that year. According to his Nobel biography it became the basis of the modifications introduced by Franz Ziehl and Friedrich Neelsen, and the Gram method of staining bacteria was also derived from it.
The disease touched Ehrlich personally. He contracted tuberculosis in the laboratory and in 1888 and 1889 travelled to Egypt and other countries to recover. In 1890, at Koch's request, he took over the tuberculosis station at a public hospital in Berlin-Moabit, and he soon joined Koch at his new Institute for Infectious Diseases, where he began the immunological work that would bring him the Nobel Prize.
The acid-fast stain that grew from Ehrlich's method, known as the Ziehl-Neelsen stain, is still a standard diagnostic tool. Together with auramine staining, it is widely used to diagnose tuberculosis quickly from samples such as sputum, and also to detect leprosy and related infections. Reliable staining turned the microscope into a practical tool for confirming the disease directly from a patient's sample.
Why it matters
Staining sputum samples under the microscope remains a fast, cheap way to detect tuberculosis, especially in low-resource settings where the disease is still a major killer.
About Paul Ehrlich
Nobel-winning German Jewish physician who imagined the “magic bullet”, founded chemotherapy and, with Salvarsan in 1909, produced the first effective drug against syphilis.
More about Paul Ehrlich
- Paul Ehrlich named and characterised the mast cellWhile still a young scientist, Paul Ehrlich named and characterised the mast cell, the immune cell now known to drive allergic reactions.
- Paul Ehrlich's maxim is the first rule of drug designPaul Ehrlich summed up a basic law of pharmacology in four Latin words, corpora non agunt nisi fixata: a drug acts only when it is bound to its target.
- Paul Ehrlich's dyes revealed the blood-brain barrierPaul Ehrlich noticed that dyes injected into the bloodstream coloured nearly every organ except the brain, an early clue to the blood-brain barrier that protects our nervous system.
- Paul Ehrlich's dyes founded modern haematologyUsing the new synthetic dyes of the 1870s and 1880s, Paul Ehrlich learned to tell the different kinds of white blood cells apart, laying the foundations of modern blood science.
- Paul Ehrlich's "magic bullet" cured syphilisPaul Ehrlich imagined a "magic bullet" that would strike disease without harming the patient, and in 1909 his lab found Salvarsan, the first modern antimicrobial drug and first cure for syphilis.
- Paul Ehrlich treated malaria with a synthetic dyeNoticing that malaria parasites soak up methylene blue, Paul Ehrlich tried the dye as a treatment, and two patients' fevers subsided, an early step toward designed synthetic drugs.
- Paul Ehrlich foresaw antibodies and receptorsPaul Ehrlich's side-chain theory proposed that cells carry receptors that bind specific toxins, an idea about antibodies that helped earn him the 1908 Nobel Prize.
- Paul Ehrlich made diphtheria antitoxin reliableWorking with Emil von Behring in the 1890s, Paul Ehrlich devised ways to measure the strength of diphtheria antitoxin, so doctors could give children safe, reliable doses.
- Paul Ehrlich’s trypan red opened the attack on trypanosomesScreening over 100 dyes in Frankfurt, Paul Ehrlich’s team found trypan red, which killed trypanosomes in infected animals, an early chemotherapy victory that led to arsenic drugs.
Sources
- Paul Ehrlich Wikipedia
- Ziehl–Neelsen stain Wikipedia
- Paul Ehrlich, Biographical NobelPrize.org
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.