Paul Ehrlich
Paul Ehrlich (German: [ˈpaʊl ˈʔeːɐ̯lɪç] ; 14 March 1854 – 20 August 1915) was a Nobel Prize-winning German physician and scientist who worked in the fields of hematology, immunology and antimicrobial chemotherapy. Among his foremost achievements were finding a cure for syphilis in 1909 and inventing the precursor technique to Gram staining bacteria. The methods he developed for staining tissue made it possible to distinguish between different types of blood cells, which led to the ability to diagnose numerous blood diseases.
For other people named Paul Ehrlich, see Paul Ehrlich (disambiguation).
Paul Ehrlich
14 March 1854
20 August 1915 (aged 61)
German
Hedwig Pinkus (1864–1948) (m. 1883; 2 children)
Stephanie and Marianne
Beiträge zur Theorie und Praxis der histologischen Färbung (1878)
His laboratory discovered arsphenamine (Salvarsan), the first antibiotic and first effective medicinal treatment for syphilis, thereby initiating and also naming the concept of chemotherapy. Ehrlich popularised the concept of a magic bullet. He also made a decisive contribution to the development of an antiserum to combat diphtheria and conceived a method for standardising therapeutic serums.[1]
In 1908, he received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his contributions to immunology.[2] He was the founder and first director of what is now known as the Paul Ehrlich Institute, a German research institution and medical regulatory body that is the nation's federal institute for vaccines and biomedicines. A genus of Rickettsiales bacteria, Ehrlichia, is named after him.[3]
Ehrlich has been called "father of immunology".[4][5]
Research[edit]
Hematological staining[edit]
In the early 1870s, Ehrlich's cousin Karl Weigert was the first person to stain bacteria with dyes and to introduce aniline pigments for histological studies and bacterial diagnostics. During his studies in Strassburg under the anatomist Heinrich Wilhelm Waldeyer, Ehrlich continued the research started by his cousin in pigments and staining tissues for microscopic study. He spent his eighth university semester in Freiburg im Breisgau investigating primarily the red dye dahlia (monophenylrosanilin), giving rise to his first publication.[9]
In 1878 he followed his dissertation supervisor Julius Friedrich Cohnheim to Leipzig, and that year obtained a doctorate with a dissertation entitled "Contributions to the Theory and Practice of Histological Staining" (Beiträge zur Theorie und Praxis der histologischen Färbung).
