Robert KOCH 1843 – 1910

He is a German physician and bacteriological scholar. He found the tuberculosis bacillus. He laid the foundations of modern bacteriology with the methods he developed for anthrax, cholera, and many infectious diseases. He was born near Hanover in 1843. After his successful high school education, he studied medicine at the University of Göttingen. He paid great attention to bacteriology. He won the first prize in a competition he participated in with his examination of the uterine nerves. By conducting important research on anthrax bacillus, he produced resistant spores of the bacillus with the bacterial methods he developed and found that he could maintain his effectiveness for years against all kinds of bad conditions.

In the light of the bacteriology techniques he developed, the rules he applied for the definition of bacteria and the examination of their disease-causing activities constituted the basic criteria of this branch of science. In his laboratory in Berlin, he showed that tuberculosis was contagious. As a result of his studies on humans and animals, he managed to obtain the tuberculosis bacillus. This success prompted him to investigate cholera epidemics in Egypt and India. He contributed to the prevention of the disease by finding the comma bacillus, which is the causative agent of cholera. In 1885 he became a professor at the University of Berlin. Outside his country, he made examinations in epidemic disease areas, including South Africa, Egypt, and India. In 1905, he won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on tuberculosis. In 1908, he became the first scientist to win the prize named after him.