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Louis Pasteur
ntroduced the terms aerobic and anaerobic in describing the growth of yeast at the expense of sugar in the presence or absence of oxygen. He observed that more alcohol was produced in the absence of oxygen when sugar is fermented, which is now termed the Pasteur effect. -
Thomas H. Huxley
Bio genesis and Abiogenesis address is the first clear statement of the basic outlines of modern Darwinian science on the question of the origin of life. -
Ferdinand J. Cohn
Contributes to the founding of the science of bacteriology. In the publication Ueber Bakterien, he discusses the role of microorganisms in the cycling of elements in nature. -
Robert Koch
Publishes a paper on his work with anthrax, pointing explicitly to a bacterium as the cause of this disease. This validates the germ theory of disease. -
John Tyndall
Publishes his method for fractional sterilization and clarifies the role of heat resistant factors (spores) in putrefaction. -
Thomas Burrill
Demonstrates for the first time a bacterial disease of plants; Micrococcus amylophorous causes pear blight. -
Joseph Lister
publishes his study of lactic fermentation of milk, demonstrating the specific cause of milk souring. -
Jules Bordet
discovers that hemolytic sera acts on foreign blood in a manner similar to the action of antimicrobic sera on microbes by precipitating the material from solution. -
Albert Neisser
identifies Neisseria gonorrhoeae, the pathogen that causes gonorrhea -
Alphonse Laveran
finds malarial parasites in erythrocytes of infected individuals and shows that the parasite enters the organism and replicates. Laveran was awarded the Noble Prize in Medicine or Physiology in 1907. -
Paul Ehrlich
refines the use of the dye methylene blue in bacteriological staining and uses it to stain the tubercule bacillus. He shows the dye binds to the bacterium and resists decoloration with an acid alcohol wash. -
Robert Koch
The search for the tubercule bacillus is more difficult than was the search for the cause of anthrax. He finally isolates the bacillus from the tissues of a workman and stains them with methylene blue, yielding blue colored rods with bends and curves. He injects the tissues from people who had died into animals and then grows the bacilli he isolates into pure cultures. -
Edward Theodore Klebs and Fredrich Loeffler
independently discover Corynebacterium diphtheriae, which causes diphtheria. Loeffler later shows that the bacterium secretes a soluble substance that affects organs beyond sites where there is physical evidence of the organism. -
Ulysse Gayon & Gabriel Dupetit
Ulysse Gayon and Gabriel Dupetit isolate in pure culture two strains of denitrifying bacteria. They show that individual organic compounds, such as sugars and alcohols, can replace complex organics and serve as reductants for nitrate, as well as serving as carbon sources. -
Ilya llich Metchnikoff
Ilya Ilich Metchnikoff demonstrates that certain body cells move to damaged areas of the body where they consume bacteria and other foreign particles. -
Hans Christian J. Gram
Hans Christian J. Gram develops a dye system for identifying bacteria [the Gram stain]. Bacteria which retain the violet dye are classified as gram-positive. -
Charles Chamberland
Charles Chamberland develops an unglazed porcelain filter that retains bacteria. -
Paul Ehrlich
Paul Ehrlich espouses the theory that certain chemicals, such as dyes, affect bacterial cells and reasoned that these chemicals could be toxic against microbes, work that lays the foundation for his development of arsenic as a treatment for syphilis. -
John Brown Buist
Devises a method for staining and fixing lymph matter from a cowpox vesicle.He believes the tiny bodies he sees are spores, he is nonetheless the first person to see a virus. -
Julius Richard Petri
working in Koch's laboratory, introduces a new type of culture dish for semi-solid media. The dish has an overhanging lid that keeps contaminants out. -
Martinus Beijerinck
uses enrichment culture, minus nitrogenous compounds, to obtain a pure culture of the root nodule bacterium Rhizobium, demonstrating that enrichment culture creates the conditions for optimal growth of a desired bacterium. -
Kitasato
obtained the first pure culture of the strict anaerobic pathogen, the tetanus bacillus Clostridium tetani. -
Sergei Winogradsky
succeeds in isolating nitrifying bacteria from soil -
Paul Ehrlich
proposes that antibodies are responsible for immunity. He shows that antibodies form against the plant toxins ricin and abrin -
Dmitri Ivanowski
publishes the first evidence of the filterability of a pathogenic agent, the virus of tobacco mosaic disease, effectively launching the field of virology. -
Theobald Smith
Establish that ticks carry Babesia microti, which causes babesiosis in animals and humans. -
Richard Pfeiffer
observes that a heat stable toxic material bound to the membrane of Vibrio Cholerae is released only after the cells are disintegrated -
Sergei Winogradsky
isolates the first free-living nitrogen-fixing organism, Clostridum pasteurianum. -
Christan Eijkman
while searching for an infectious agent, discovers that beriberi is the result of a vitamin deficiency. And he was awarded a nobel prize. -
Paul Ehrlich
proposes his "side-chain" theory of immunity and develops standards for toxin and antitoxin.
