How Microbes Became the Cause of Disease and Then Its Target

Germ theory displaced the older miasma and spontaneous generation accounts of disease, and it credits Louis Pasteur with linking specific microbes to specific diseases and Robert Koch with setting the criteria for proving a microbe causes a disease.

Joseph Lister put the new theory to work in surgery at Glasgow Royal Infirmary between 1865 and 1867, using carbolic acid on instruments, wounds and hands, and published On the Antiseptic Principle in the Practice of Surgery in 1867.

On March 24, 1882 Robert Koch announced the bacterium behind tuberculosis to the Berlin Physiological Society, and the work led to Koch's postulates and the 1905 Nobel Prize.

Koch isolated the cholera organism in pure culture in Calcutta in January 1884, though Filippo Pacini had described the comma-shaped bacilli correctly in 1854 and his work went largely unnoticed.

In 1885 Pasteur and Emile Roux treated nine year old Joseph Meister with a vaccine made from dried rabbit spinal cords, and the success led to the founding of the Pasteur Institute in Paris in 1888.

Emil von Behring and Kitasato Shibasaburo showed in 1890 that serum from an immunized animal could protect another; Behring won the first Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1901 while Kitasato was left out because the prize rules allowed a single recipient.

Alexandre Yersin isolated the plague bacillus on June 23, 1894 in Hong Kong, working in a straw-hut laboratory, and showed that the same organism infected rodents as well as humans.

Dmitri Ivanovsky showed in 1892 that tobacco mosaic disease passed through a filter fine enough to stop bacteria, and Martinus Beijerinck extended the experiment in 1898 and coined the term virus.

In 1909 Paul Ehrlich identified Compound 606, later sold as Salvarsan, the first agent pursued from theoretical chemical reasoning as a magic bullet against a specific pathogen, the syphilis spirochete.

Alexander Fleming observed in 1928 that a stray mold on a culture plate inhibited nearby bacteria, and it took the Oxford team of Howard Florey and Ernst Chain in the early 1940s to turn it into a usable drug.

Gerhard Domagk tested the dye Prontosil in 1932 and found it cured streptococcal infections in mice; the active agent proved to be sulfanilamide, whose expired patent let sulfa drugs spread worldwide.

Albert Schatz isolated streptomycin on 19 October 1943 in Selman Waksman's Rutgers laboratory, the first antibiotic cure for tuberculosis, and the credit dispute ended with Schatz recognized as co-discoverer.