The Koch-Pasteur Rivalry

Robert Koch is credited with the discovery of the Koch’s Postulate. Then he went on to discover the Anthrax bacillus, Vibrio Cholera and of course the Mycobacterium Tuberculosis. It should be taken as the greatest medical achievement of all time. He was awarded the 1905 Nobel prize for his seminal work.

What is so great about these ?

Koch’s Postulate broke the century old belief that diseases are caused by God’s wrath, or as the Romans believed as bad air ( Mal-aria). It established the Germ theory which led to discovery of antibiotics and mankind’s conquest over bacteria.

Robert Koch is the father of Microbiology.

Koch had started the method of culture to identify organisms.

Ramakanta Mahapatra

Robert koch had a brilliant academic career. He went on to become a country doctor and then set up the Koch’s lab in Berlin which did pioneering work in bacteriology.

While miracles in medicine is being wrought in Berlin, how can Paris stay behind ? There was a war going on between France and Germany and there was intense rivalry between both the nations.

Pasteur was a terrible student. It took him several chances to get into the college and finally became a Chemistry teacher.

He was a brilliant chemist. Louis Pasteur discovered molecular Chirality. Chirality in chemistry means handedness. Pasteur postulated that the same molecule can be either left handed or right handed ie. D and L isomer. Today we are using Pasteur’s concept in discovering new molecules like levocetirizine, levoflox, Dextrose, S amlodipine, Esomeprazole and so on.

Pasteur has established the Pasteur lab in Paris. Pasteurisation is probably the most widely used technology in our world. Pasteur was awarded the highest honour by Germany. But he returned the award as a protest against the Franco-Prussian war. Since then these two world class labs became sworn enemy of each other.

Pasteur was not a doctor. But he had invented vaccines against Anthrax, Cholera etc for animals and of course Rabies. Till then the world was using Jenner’s small pox vaccine. It was a chance discovery that the cow pox virus can confer cross immunity against the small pox virus. But it was impossible to find such a partner for every organism.

Pasteur had solved this problem by inventing the technology of Attenuation. Pasteur was working on Chicken Cholera. We must understand that it was the disease not the virus. Viruses are too small to be visible in the Anthony Van Leeuwenhoek’s microscope. But Pasteur could observe that weakened strains of chicken cholera can prevent the growth of the more virulent strains of the same organism. This concept is known as Attenuation. Believe me, all the live vaccines are made still using Pasteur’s technique. For example Oral Polio: Do bund zindagi ki.

Pasteur had been able to attenuate the rabies virus by serially passing the ground spine of a rabid animal several times of course without understanding what actually is happening. Because the world of Koch and Pasteur was blissfully unaware of another infinitesimal live assassin, which today we call the Virus.

Even till toady, we adopt Pasteur’s technique to attenuate viruses for making all live attenuated vaccine like Oral Polio. Pasteur seemed to have walked into the most secret chamber of immunology when the word immunology did not exist.

Of course, he had not won a Nobel Prize. That’s because he had died in 1895, just 5 years before the institution of Nobel prize. Nobel prize is never awarded posthumously.

In 1885, nine-year-old Joseph Meister was badly bitten by a rabid dog. His treating physician had heard about this new drug that Louis Pasteur had been using in animals to prevent rabies. Rabies was 100% fatal even today. But the powder of ground spine of a rabbit had never been injected into a living human being till such time. Pasteur’s chief assistant revolted against the idea. But Louis Pasteur inoculated the boy with spinal tissue that he has collected from a rabid rabbit in his chemistry lab. That was the most audacious thing to have happened to mankind. More intriguing than the godmen curing all the chronic diseases by merely touching.

The treatment was successful and the boy did not develop rabies.

Joseph Meister became the first human being that has survived Rabies after a medical intervention.

He was so overwhelmed by this new life given to him by Louis Pasteur that Meister served as a caretaker at the Pasteur  Institute until his death in 1940 at age 64.

On 24 June 1940, ten days after the Germans occupied Paris during the World War II, Meister apprehended that the sanctity of Pasteur lab will be vandalised by the Germans and he committed suicide with his gas gun.

isource:: nternet

How the rivalry between these two legends had changed our world of medicine ?

May go through my blog, link for which is given below.

How Robert Koch and Louis Pasteur changed the world ?

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