Paul ehrlich

Paul Ehrlich (German pronunciation: /paы.l ε...l (?·i)Strehlen, Silesia; today Strzelin, Poland; March 14, 1854 - Hamburg, German Empire; August 20, 1915) was an eminent German physician and bacteriologist, winner of the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1908. Among his most prominent achievements were finding a cure for syphilis in 1909 and inventing the precursor technique for the staining of Gram bacteria. The methods he developed to dye tissue made it possible to distinguish between different types of blood cells, which led to the possibility of diagnosing numerous blood diseases.

His laboratory discovered arsphenamine (then known as Salvarsan), the first effective medicinal treatment against syphilis, initiating and giving its name to the concept of chemotherapy. Ehrlich popularized the concept of the magic bullet in medicine, as a specific product capable of completely eliminating a certain pathogenic organism without significant side effects.

He also made a decisive contribution to the field of immunology with the development of an immunological serum to combat diphtheria and devised a therapeutic method for the normalization of these sera.

In 1908, he received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his contributions to immunology. He was the founder and first director of what is now known as the Paul Ehrlich Institute, a research center and medical regulatory body that is the nation's federal institute dedicated to vaccines and biomedicine. A genus of Rickettsiales bacteria, Ehrlichia , was named in his honor.

Life and career

Born on March 14, 1854 in Strehlen (Silesia, in what is now southwestern Poland), Paul Ehrlich was the second son of Rosa (Weigert) and Ismar Ehrlich. His father was an innkeeper and distiller liquor store and the royal lottery collector in Strehelen, a town of about 5,000 in the province of Lower Silesia, now in Poland. His grandfather, Heymann Ehrlich, had been a successful distiller and bartender. Ismar Ehrlich was one of the leaders of the local Jewish community.

After primary school, Paul Ehrlich attended the long-established Maria Magdalene Gymnasium secondary school in Wrocław (Breslau, present-day Wrocław), where he met Albert Neisser, who later became a professional colleague. While still a schoolboy (inspired by his cousin Karl Weigert, who owned one of the first microtomes), he became fascinated by the process of staining tissue using dyes for microscopic observation of it. He retained that interest throughout his later medical studies at the university.

He studied at the University of Wroclaw and later at the University of Strasbourg, Freiburg im Breisgau and Leipzig, where he finished his studies, earning his doctorate in 1878 with a thesis on the theory and practice of histological staining. To him we owe the demonstration of the existence of the blood-brain barrier by staining the blood of a mouse with aniline and demonstrating that this substance did not stain the brain.

After obtaining a new doctorate in 1882, he began working as an assistant in the clinic of the University of Berlin under Theodor Frerichs, (the founder of experimental clinical medicine), focusing on histology, hematology and stains. He was appointed assistant professor of the same in 1889 and the following year professor of internal medicine. He was director of the Hospital de la Caridad, in Berlin, where he promoted the field of hematology, developing methods for the detection and differentiation of various blood diseases.

He married Hedwig Pinkus (then 19 years old) in 1883 in Neustadt in Oberschlesien (now Prudnik). The couple had two daughters, Stephanie and Marianne.

Memorial Plate in Bergstraße 96 in Berlin-Steglitz, where Ehrlich lived and worked (1890-1899)

After completing his clinical training and habilitation at Berlin's prominent Charité medical school and teaching hospital in 1886, Ehrlich traveled to Egypt and other countries in 1888 and 1889, in part to cure a case of tuberculosis he had contracted. at the laboratory. On his return he established a private medical practice and a small laboratory in Berlin-Steglitz.

In 1891, Robert Koch invited Ehrlich to join the staff of his Institute for Infectious Diseases in Berlin, which spun off in 1896 into the Institute for Serological Research and Testing (Institut für Serumforschung und Serumprüfung), established for the specialty of Ehrlich, who was its first director.

Ehrlich tomb in the Jewish cemetery of Rata-Beil-Straße in Frankfurt

In 1896 he was appointed director of the Royal Prussian Institute for Serum Research and Testing, where he developed various methods of staining tissue with aniline to study the microchemical reactions of toxins. One of his major innovations consisted in the use of different dyes (methylene blue and indophenol blue) as selective dyes for different cell types. In this sense, he was the first to investigate the pathways of the nervous system, injecting methylene blue into the veins of live rabbits, obtaining extraordinary experimental results when treating animals suffering from sleeping sickness with an azo derivative. In 1904 he cured a mouse infected with trypanosomiasis by injecting the dye into its bloodstream today known as trypan red.

Immunology: His main contribution to medicine was the theory of side-chain immunity, which established the chemical basis for the specificity of the immune response and explained how receptors on the outside of cells combine with toxins to produce immune bodies capable of fighting disease. His theory was that cells have specific receptor molecules (side chains) on their surface that only bind certain chemical groups of toxin molecules; if the cells survive this binding, a surplus of side chains is produced, some of which are released into the blood as circulating antitoxins (now called antibodies).

Chemotherapy: He also made important contributions in the field of chemotherapy, which include the discovery -in 1901- of 606 (because it was the result of 606 experiments), the which he himself called magic bullet or salvarsan (arsphenamine), a preparation of organic arsenic used in the treatment of syphilis and relapsing fever, and neosalvarsan (neoarsphenamine). Neosalvarsan was known for a long time as "Ehrlich 914" because it was the 914th compound prepared by Ehrlich and his assistant to combat these diseases.

Paul Ehrlich on 200 marks.

Ehrlich called these preparations «magic bullets», since they were the first synthesized compounds that were used to cure infectious diseases caused by protozoa and bacteria.

In 1899 his institute moved to Frankfurt and was renamed the Institute for Experimental Therapy (Institut für experimentelle Therapie ), with Max Neisser as one of its most important collaborators. In 1906 Ehrlich became the director of the Georg Speyer House in Frankfurt, a private research foundation affiliated with his institute. Here he discovered in 1909 the first drug directed against a specific pathogen: Salvarsan, a treatment for syphilis, which was at the time one of the deadliest infectious diseases in Europe. Among the invited foreign scientists who worked with Ehrlich were two Nobel Prize winners, Henry Hallett Dale and Paul Karrer. The institute was renamed the Paul Ehrlich Institute in Ehrlich's honor in 1947.

In 1908, he shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine with the Russian bacteriologist Ilya Mechnikov in recognition of their work in the field of immunological chemistry.

In 1914 Ehrlich signed the controversial Manifesto of the Ninety-Three, which was a defense of Germany's militaristic policy in World War I. On August 17, 1915 Ehrlich suffered a heart attack and died on August 20 in Bad Homburg. German Emperor Wilhelm II wrote in a condolence telegram, "I, together with the entire civilized world, mourn the death of this meritorious researcher for his great service to medical science and suffering humanity;" his life's work assures him immortal fame and the appreciation of both his contemporaries and generations of posterity.& # 34;

Paul Ehrlich was buried in the Old Jewish Cemetery, Frankfurt (Block 114 N)

Eponymy

• The genus of bacteria Ehrlichia
• The Paul Ehrlich Institute
• The asteroid (65708) Ehrlich
• Moon crater Ehrlich
• The reactive of Ehrlich (ethylalcohol, p-dimethylaminobenzaldehyde and concentrated chloric acid), used in the indol test in bacteriology.