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Today's Google Doodle Honors Bacteriologist Robert Koch

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Today's Google Doodle celebrates Robert Koch, the father of bacteriology. He received the 1905 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering the bacterium that causes tuberculosis, and he had previously identified the microscopic culprits behind anthrax and cholera. But more importantly, Koch was the scientist who figured out how to study bacteria in the first place.

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He first isolated cultures of bacteria on potato slices, then became one of the first to adopt the Petri dish (today's Google Doodle includes images of both). Koch also pioneered the use of agar, which is still the medium used for most bacterial cultures today, over a century later. Without his work, we couldn't study how bacteria grow, how to fight them, or what potentially useful chemicals they produce.

Koch also laid the groundwork for modern epidemiology, spelling out four criteria for linking a disease to a pathogen.

  1. The organism must always be present, in every case of the disease.
  2. The organism must be isolated from a host containing the disease and grown in pure culture.
  3. Samples of the organism taken from pure culture must cause the same disease when inoculated into a healthy, susceptible animal in the laboratory.
  4. The organism must be isolated from the inoculated animal and must be identified as the same original organism first isolated from the originally diseased host.

He used those criteria to discover the bacteria that caused of anthrax (in 1876), cholera (in 1884), and tuberculosis (in 1882). Using Koch's methods -- and inspired by his proof that it could be done -- other scientists soon found the bacteria responsible for several other diseases, ushering in what has been called a Golden Age of Bacteriology around the turn of the 20th century.

Those discoveries were vital, because if you want to prevent or cure a disease, you need to understand what causes it and how it spreads. Once Koch had discovered what caused tuberculosis, a cure seemed like the logical next step. And in 1890, he surprised everyone by announcing that he had discovered exactly that.

The Tuberculin Fiasco

"If the importance of a disease for mankind is measured by the number of fatalities it causes, then tuberculosis must be considered much more important than those most feared infectious diseases, plague, cholera and the like. One in seven of all human beings dies from tuberculosis. If one only considers the productive middle-age groups, tuberculosis carries away one-third, and often more," he said during his 1905 Nobel Prize lecture. And by 1890, Koch himself already had a reputation as a brilliant medical researcher, so it's no surprise that people lined up for his inoculations.

The problem was that Koch, himself, had been so driven, and so optimistic, that he had rushed his "cure" to market without enough testing or scrutiny. It was only once the first patients started dying, and Rudolf Virchow's autopsies turned up live tuberculosis bacteria in their remains, that everyone began to realize Dr. Koch's miracle cure really wasn't one.

He had tested tuberculin, which consisted of proteins he'd extracted from the tuberculosis bacterium, on guinea pigs, but only on a handful of people - including his then-mistress, 16-year-old Hedwig Freiberg, who for some reason later married him anyway. He'd seen some evidence that humans suffered worse side effects than guinea pigs, including fever, nausea, and joint pain, but dismissed the problem in his haste to get the drug to market.

Many people at the time accused Koch of trying to profit from a scam -- which was a common ploy in the days before pharmaceutical regulations -- but given his later work and his track record of successful research before and after the tuberculin debacle, it seems much more likely that he was actually just overly hasty.

The 1905 Nobel Prize underscored the value of Koch's work, however. It recognized his 1882 discovery of the pathogen that actually caused the deadly disease, Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Without that discovery, it would have been impossible to even contemplate a real search for a cure.

Human Guinea Pigs

The story of Koch's groundbreaking career does underscore how dangerously unregulated medical research was at the turn of the last century, however -- and how high the human toll could be.

In early 1906, just a few months after receiving his Nobel Prize, Koch and his wife traveled to eastern Africa, where an epidemic of sleeping sickness, or trypanomiasis, had ravaged the population since 1902. In 1903, about two million people died of sleeping sickness in the Lake Victoria region. That included 20,000 people in Uganda's Sese Islands - two thirds of the population. Koch's job was to study how the disease spread and figure out what could be done to contain it.

His research team set up camp in the Sese Islands and set to work testing experimental drugs on the local villagers. One of them was Atoxyl, an arsenic compound which caused vertigo, sickness, and colic. Several people were permanently blinded; it turns out that Atoxyl damages the optic nerve. Koch's team tested a number of other arsenic compounds as well. A few of them appeared to relieve the symptoms of sleeping sickness in the short term, but the team could never get all the parasites out of their patients' blood. In very simple terms, that's because the arsenic compounds were making the human patients sicker faster than they were killing the parasites.

Although Koch's journals indicate that people traveled to the camp voluntarily, it doesn't seem that they realized they were being experimented on. And that underscores an uncomfortable fact about most of the early breakthroughs that have shaped modern medicine: those breakthroughs often happened at the expense of vulnerable people, and the African subjects of British and German colonial rule in east Africa were as vulnerable as could be.

Of course, the reality of turn-of-the-century clinical testing doesn't make Koch's contributions to modern science any less significant, or his work any less impressive. But it's important to remember that scientific discovery doesn't take place in a social or historical vacuum, and we have to look critically at how the metaphorical sausage gets made.