A schoolmaster’s son in Odessa
Vladimir Aronovich Khavkin, later known to the world as Waldemar Mordecai Wolff Haffkine, was born on March 15, 1860, in Odessa, the bustling Black Sea port of the Russian Empire, now in Ukraine. He was the fourth of five children of Aaron Haffkine, a Jewish schoolmaster, and Rosalie Landsberg, the daughter of a Hebrew teacher. Money was short, and the family moved for a time to Berdyansk on the Sea of Azov, where Waldemar attended school before going on to gymnasium studies.
His youth was shaped by the violence that Jews faced in the Russian Empire. After the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881 and the pogroms that followed, he joined a Jewish self-defence group in Odessa. He was injured defending a Jewish home and was arrested, and he was later released through the intervention of his teacher, the zoologist Ilya Mechnikov, a future Nobel laureate who recognised his talent.
A scientist with no place at home
Haffkine studied natural sciences under Mechnikov at the university in Odessa, completing a dissertation in zoology in the early 1880s, and worked at the city’s zoological museum. But as a Jew he was barred from a professorship in Russia. In 1888 he left for Switzerland and taught physiology at Geneva for a year. In 1889 Mechnikov, who had moved to Louis Pasteur’s new institute in Paris, helped him join it. The only post available was that of librarian, and Haffkine took it, doing research in his spare hours.
He began as a protozoologist, studying single-celled organisms such as Euglena and Paramecium, and a genus of these organisms, Khawkinea, is named after him. In the early 1890s he turned to the practical problem that would define his life: how to protect people against the great epidemic killers.
Cholera, and a test on himself
Cholera, spread through contaminated water, could kill a healthy adult within a day through catastrophic diarrhoea and dehydration, and it swept repeatedly through Asia and Europe in the nineteenth century. Working at the Pasteur Institute, Haffkine produced a weakened form of the cholera bacterium that could be injected to build immunity. On July 18, 1892, he tested it on himself, and he reported the results at the end of that month.
Haffkine’s work rested on discoveries made only a few years earlier. In 1883 and 1884 the German physician Robert Koch had identified the comma-shaped bacterium that causes cholera, and Pasteur had shown that weakened germs could be used to protect animals against diseases such as anthrax and rabies. Haffkine’s achievement was to turn these ideas into a vaccine that could be made in quantity and given safely to large numbers of people, and then to prove in the field that it worked.
The scientific establishment, in France, Germany and Russia alike, was slow to accept his work. Haffkine reasoned that the real proof would come only where cholera was raging, and he chose India. With the help of the Marquis of Dufferin, the British ambassador in Paris and a former viceroy of India, he was allowed to take his vaccine to the British-ruled subcontinent. He arrived in 1893 and began large-scale inoculation campaigns in Calcutta and across northern India and elsewhere in India, recording carefully who was protected and who was not. He caught malaria in 1895, recovered in England, and returned to India in 1896.
The plague comes to Bombay
Bubonic plague is caused by a bacterium, later named Yersinia pestis, that is carried by rats and spread to people by the bites of their fleas. The bacterium had been identified only in 1894, in Hong Kong, at the start of a pandemic that spread along shipping routes and would kill millions, most of them in India. Bombay, a crowded port city, was among the first places in India to be struck.
In October 1896 bubonic plague broke out in Bombay, now Mumbai. The colonial government asked Haffkine to help. He set up a makeshift laboratory in a corridor of Grant Medical College, with a tiny staff, and worked at a pace that exhausted those around him: one assistant had a nervous breakdown and two others quit. Within about three months he had a vaccine. He grew plague bacteria and killed them by heating to 60 degrees Celsius, making him the first to prepare a vaccine for human use from killed bacteria in this way.
On January 10, 1897, he injected himself with a large dose, with the principal of the college as witness. Next came volunteers at Byculla jail during an outbreak among the prisoners: the inoculated inmates survived, while seven prisoners in the unvaccinated group died. The vaccine was not perfect. It had unpleasant side effects, gave incomplete protection, and did not prevent the pneumonic form of plague. But it reduced the risk substantially at a time when there was no other defence, and by the turn of the century about four million people in India had received it. Haffkine became director of the Plague Laboratory in Bombay, which moved in 1899 into Sans Pareil, the former residence of the governor of Bombay at Parel.
The Mulkowal tragedy and his vindication
In March 1902, at the village of Mulkowal in the Punjab, nineteen people inoculated with plague vaccine died of tetanus. All had been injected from a single bottle; the other villagers inoculated that day were unharmed. A government commission blamed contamination at Haffkine’s laboratory, which had recently changed its sterilisation method, and Haffkine was relieved of his post and returned to England under a cloud.
He fought to clear his name, and leading scientists took up his cause. The Lister Institute in London re-examined the evidence and pointed to a different explanation: the bottle had been opened in the field with an instrument that an assistant had dropped and not sterilised. In 1907 a letter to The Times signed by Ronald Ross, Simon Flexner and other eminent scientists declared the case against him disproven, and he was exonerated. Historians have compared the affair to the Dreyfus case, and some, like the writer Paul Twivy, have argued that prejudice against Haffkine as a Jew, a Russian and a man without a medical degree played a part.
Later years in Calcutta and Europe
His old post in Bombay had been filled, so Haffkine became director of the Biological Laboratory in Calcutta. There he was kept to theoretical work and not allowed to run the field trials he did best. He retired in 1914 and returned to France, writing occasionally for medical journals. He had become a French citizen in 1898 and a British subject in 1900. In 1925 the Bombay laboratory he founded was renamed the Haffkine Institute in his honour. In 1928 he settled in Lausanne, Switzerland, where he died in October 1930, aged 70.
Recognition had come in his lifetime too. He was made a Companion of the Order of the Indian Empire in Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee honours in 1897, and the surgeon Joseph Lister, the father of antiseptic surgery, called him a saviour of humanity.
A return to Jewish faith
Haffkine’s Jewish identity ran through his whole life, from the self-defence group in Odessa to the closed doors of Russian academia. In 1898 he approached the Aga Khan III with a plan to ask the Ottoman sultan to allow Jews to resettle in Palestine, financed by land purchases and wealthy Jewish donors; it was rejected. In his later years he became deeply religious, returning, as his biographer Selman Waksman wrote, to Orthodox practice.
In 1916 he published an essay, A Plea for Orthodoxy, praising traditional observance and the value of Jewish community life. He supported Zionism and Orthodox causes, and in 1929 he established the Haffkine Foundation to support Jewish religious education in Eastern Europe. The Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, corresponded with him about helping Jews in Soviet Russia.
Legacy
Haffkine was the first scientist to develop and use vaccines against both cholera and plague, and he showed, through large and carefully recorded field trials, that mass inoculation could protect whole populations in the middle of an epidemic. His insistence on statistics, control groups and real-world testing helped set the pattern for how vaccines are evaluated to this day.
His plague vaccine stayed in use in India for decades after the Mulkowal affair, and his cholera vaccine was the forerunner of the killed whole-cell cholera vaccines that followed. The historian Simon Schama, who researched him for his book Foreign Bodies on the history of pandemics, compared the injustice done to him to the Dreyfus affair. His story, of a Jewish scientist shut out of his own country who went on to save lives on another continent, is one of the great untold stories of public health.
The Haffkine Institute in Mumbai, founded as his Plague Research Laboratory in 1899, still trains scientists and carries out biomedical research and testing, and the state-owned Haffkine Bio-Pharmaceutical Corporation that grew from it has for decades made vaccines, antivenoms and antisera for India, although it has recently struggled with funding and production. In Israel, Haffkine Park was planted in the 1960s for the centenary of his birth. The playwright Paul Twivy, who studied his life, called him the most important scientist in terms of the number of lives he saved. Few people outside India and the history of medicine know his name; millions owe their lives to his work.
Sources & further reading
Waldemar Haffkine, Wikipedia · Dr. Waldemar Mordecai Haffkine, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Bombay heritage pages · Haffkine Institute, Wikipedia · This day, March 15, 1860, Waldemar Mordechai Wolff Haffkine was born, Museum “Jewish Memory and Holocaust in Ukraine” · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
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