Robert Koch

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00:00The Nobel Prize

00:13The day will come when man will have to fight noise as inexorably as cholera and the plague.

00:22Robert Koch

00:23The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1905

00:27Robert Koch was a German physician who is widely credited as one of the founders of bacteriology and microbiology.

00:37He investigated the anthrax disease cycle in 1876

00:41and studied the bacteria that causes tuberculosis in 1882 and cholera in 1883.

00:50He also formulated Koch's pastulates.

00:53Robert Heinrich Hermann Koch was born on December 11, 1843, in Klausthal, Germany.

01:01The son of a mining engineer, he demonstrated a gifted mind at an early age,

01:07reportedly announcing to his parents at the age of five that he had taught himself to read by using newspapers.

01:14In 1862, Koch enrolled at the University of Göttingen to study medicine.

01:21Among his influential professors was Jacob Henle, a leading anatomist and proponent of the germ theory of disease.

01:30After earning his medical degree in 1866, Koch worked as a hospital assistant.

01:36He passed the district medical officer's examination and by 1870, he began volunteering for medical service in the Franco-Prussian War.

01:48In 1872, he became district medical officer for Wallstein, where he began compiling the research on bacteria that would make him famous.

01:59His main duty as a medical officer was investigating the spread of infectious bacterial diseases.

02:06Koch was very much interested in the transmission of anthrax from cattle to humans.

02:12Not very happy with the prevailing process of confirming the cause of infectious disease,

02:18Koch formulated four criteria in 1890 that must be achieved for establishing a cause of an infectious disease.

02:27These rules were termed as Koch's postulates, or Henley-Koch postulates.

02:33In 1890, Koch announced that he had developed a cure for tuberculosis called tuberculin.

02:41This prompted patients and physicians alike to travel to Berlin,

02:47and for Koch to take on a new role as director of the new Institute for Infectious Diseases.

02:54However, the so-called cure was soon revealed to have little therapeutic value, damaging Koch's reputation in the medical community.

03:03In 1901, Koch attended the International Tuberculosis Congress in Washington, D.C.,

03:10where he argued that bovine tuberculosis was of a separate nature from the form that afflicted humans,

03:18and as such was relatively harmless to men.

03:21While correct that the bacilli causing bovine tuberculosis was different,

03:28he was ultimately proven wrong in his belief that it had little effect on humans,

03:34and that no public measures were needed to purge infected livestock.

03:39Long harboring a love for travel, Koch spent much of the remaining fifteen years of his life

03:45visiting foreign countries to embark on new research.

03:49In the late 1890s, he travelled to Rhodesia, South Africa, to help stem an outbreak of Rheindapest,

03:58and he followed with stops in other parts of Africa and India to study malaria, sarah, and other diseases.

04:07After stepping down as director of the Institute for Infectious Disease, later renamed to the Koch Institute,

04:14in 1904 Koch returned to Africa to study trypanosomiasis

04:20and visited relatives in the U.S.

04:25He died of heart disease on May 27, 1910, in Baden-Baden, Germany.

04:33On December 10, 2017, Google celebrated the 112th anniversary of Koch's Nobel Prize win

04:42with one of its celebrated Google Doodles.