Louis Koch Research Paper

How far did the Two World Wars attribute to arresting the spread of disease between the 1880s and 1950s? –
An essay by Danial Rizvi 11V

During the Franco-Prussian War, a German doctor, Robert Koch, became interested in the work of Louis Pasteur. Pasteur was a French doctor whose work on immunization had attracted Koch to get immersed in it. This stirred their rivalry, which was flamed by the passion of their patriotic goals. Koch was as hard working and skilled in experimenting as Pasteur. When Pasteur was past stuck, Koch hard balled it and with German funding and industrial dies he found that he could stain bacteria that he acquired from blood and pus. Koch could then isolate, test and identify the bacteria. Koch would go on and sample the bacteria until he found the ones that formed the immunogene he needed. This paved
way for a wave of discoveries and a new method of identification of previously unknown diseases and how to cure them.
Now, rather than shooting in the dark, scientists could effectively corner and conquer diseases.

‘Magic Bullets’ was the name given to chemicals would that kill bacteria inside the host, an internal anti-septic. The first developing one was Salversan 606 made by Paul Ehrlich, a member of Koch’s research team. Salversan was a cure for syphilis. Paul called his cure ‘magic bullets’ because they homed in on and destroyed the harmful bacteria that cause diseases. Ehrlich had proved that chemicals too could kill bacteria. But using Salversan 606 also damaged the host cells and killed the patients. This began the search for a less fatal cure. It was the 1930’s when Gerhard Domagk developed a second testing magic bullet called Prontosil. He was testing it on mice when he discovered that it killed the microbes
that caused septicemia. His first human test was his daughter after she contracted the disease by an infected needle. Domagk cured her and scientists discovered that the vital chemical in this cure was sulphonamide. It was used to make a later cure for pneumonia because sulphonamides weren’t harsh on the host’s bodies. But sulphonamides didn’t create the needed resistance after the patient was cured. Looking at this and finding that no chemical cures worked on streptococci and staphylococci bacteria that plagued the soldiers in WWI, English researcher Alexander Fleming spent ten years finding a cure. The cure was found while he was on holiday and had left the bacteria on a petri dish on a bench. Upon his return he discovered a mold growing on the dish, which had managed to kill surrounding bacteria. Further experiments were carried out which led him to the following conclusions. The cure was penicillin, if diluted, it would kill bacteria without harming cells and produce resistance, it didn’t work on deeper wounds and it took long to produce.

Due to penicillin’s reluctance in mass production Fleming couldn’t produce enough doses or evidence to prove its usefulness. It took another ten more years at the brink of war for doctors Howard Florey and Ernst Chain to read Fleming’s study and try to tackle the problem by first getting funding. With a war about to start funding from America gave them enough to go on for 5 years. It was easy to cure mice with penicillin but for a human it took 3000 times that dosage. Their first human trial was on a police officer with septicemia, he started getting better but the dosage ran out after five days and he died. Now with fresh evidence, Florey and Chain returned to America for resources because English factories were busy. They came at just the right time because America had suffered at Pearl Harbour and had entered the war. The American government realized the potential of penicillin and they gave out interest free loans to companies to buy the expensive equipment and mass-produce penicillin.