Kiyoshi Shiga

Kiyoshi Shiga was a Japanese physician and bacteriologist who lived from 1871 to 1957. Born in Sendai, he studied medicine at Tokyo Imperial University and joined the Institute for the Study of Infectious Diseases under Kitasato Shibasaburo. During a severe dysentery epidemic in Japan in 1897 he isolated and identified the bacterium that causes the disease, first called Bacillus dysenteriae and later renamed Shigella dysenteriae in his honour. He also worked out the toxin the organism produces, which now bears his name as Shiga toxin, and tried to develop a vaccine, testing an early heat-killed version on himself. From 1901 to 1905 he worked with Paul Ehrlich in Germany, and he later became a professor at Keio University and president of Keijo Imperial University in Seoul. He wrote widely read textbooks on bacteriology and immunology.