- Person
- Waldemar Haffkine
- Lived
- 1860–1930
- Field
- Bacteriology
- From
- Russian-born French-British
The story
Waldemar Haffkine was born in 1860 in Odessa, the son of a Jewish schoolmaster. As a Jew he was barred from a professorship in the Russian Empire, so he left for Western Europe and in 1889 joined the Pasteur Institute in Paris, at first as its librarian. There he developed a cholera vaccine, testing it on himself on July 18, 1892, and in 1893 he took it to India, where cholera killed huge numbers of people, and began large-scale inoculation.
In October 1896 bubonic plague, carried by rats and spread to people by fleas, broke out in Bombay, now Mumbai. The government asked Haffkine for help. He set up a makeshift laboratory in a corridor of Grant Medical College with a tiny staff and worked so intensely that one assistant suffered a breakdown and two others quit. Within about three months he had a vaccine, made from plague bacteria killed by heating.
On January 10, 1897, he injected himself with it, with the principal of the college as witness. Volunteers at Byculla jail, where plague had broken out, were then inoculated: those who received the vaccine survived, while seven prisoners in the unvaccinated group died. The vaccine was not perfect. It caused unpleasant side effects, gave incomplete protection and did not prevent the pneumonic form of the disease, but it substantially reduced the risk at a time when there was no other defence. By the turn of the century about four million people in India had received it.
In 1899 Haffkine’s Plague Research Laboratory moved to a former governor’s residence at Parel in Bombay. Even after he was unjustly blamed for a contaminated batch in 1902 and later cleared, his vaccine stayed in use. In 1925 the laboratory was renamed the Haffkine Institute, which still trains scientists and carries out biomedical research in Mumbai.
Why it matters
Haffkine showed that mass vaccination could protect whole populations during an epidemic, and the institute he founded in Mumbai has served public health in India for more than a century.
About Waldemar Haffkine
Odessa-born bacteriologist who made the first vaccines against cholera and bubonic plague, tested them on himself, and protected millions in India. A Mumbai institute bears his name.
Sources
- Waldemar Haffkine Wikipedia
- Dr. Waldemar Mordecai Haffkine Tata Institute of Fundamental Research
- Haffkine Institute 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.