- Person
- Paul Ehrlich
- Lived
- 1854–1915
- Field
- Immunology & chemotherapy
- From
- German
The story
Methylene blue was first made in 1876 by the German chemist Heinrich Caro, one of the many synthetic dyes produced by Germany's chemical industry. Paul Ehrlich found it especially good for staining bacteria, and in 1887 he showed that it also stained the long fibres of nerve cells in living tissue.
His lifelong idea was that a chemical which seeks out a particular kind of cell might also be used to attack it. After mid-1889, when he was without a post, he carried on his research privately. Because the parasites of the family that includes the malaria organism can be stained with methylene blue, he reasoned that the dye might harm them while sparing the patient.
In 1891 Ehrlich and the physician Paul Guttmann tested the idea on two malaria patients at the city hospital in Berlin-Moabit. Their fevers subsided and the parasites disappeared from their blood. Ehrlich obtained the dye from the firm Meister Lucius & Brüning, later Hoechst, the start of a long collaboration with the company.
Methylene blue has been described as the first fully synthetic drug used in medicine. It was one of the first times a synthetic chemical had been chosen as a medicine because of the way it interacted with a disease-causing organism. Ehrlich and his contemporaries believed that drugs worked like dyes, by preferentially binding to germs, a theory that proved partly correct.
The experiment pointed the way. In Frankfurt Ehrlich looked for agents as effective as methylene blue but without its side effects, taking the action of quinine on malaria as his model, and the same reasoning led to trypan red and then to Salvarsan against syphilis. Methylene blue itself has been used against malaria for more than a century, and it is now mainly used to treat methemoglobinemia, a blood disorder, and appears on the World Health Organization's List of Essential Medicines.
Why it matters
Ehrlich's methylene blue trial was an early demonstration of rational drug design, the approach that has since produced most of the medicines we rely on.
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 improved the tuberculosis test overnightThe day after Robert Koch announced the tuberculosis bacterium in March 1882, Paul Ehrlich improved Koch's method of staining it, making the deadly germ far easier to detect.
- 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 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
- Methylene blue Wikipedia
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.