Understanding Koch

The physician and scientist Robert Koch was the founder of bacteriology. He discovered the connection between bacterial agents and the transmission of diseases, and studied hygiene and epidemics. His theories helped extend life expectancy and led to increased health of people around the world – two events which continue to be a driving force behind modern microbiology.

From 1870 to 1871 he worked as a surgeon during the Franco-Prussian War. Returning from the battle field, he took up a post as a public health officer in the former German province of Poznan, which today lies in Poland. It was there that he began studying the biology of bacteria. At the time there were still no electron microscopes and bacteria were the smallest pathogens that could be seen with a standard microscope.

Koch discovered the anthrax bacterium, and was the first to describe how it was transmitted. His findings were published in 1876, and were so well received that he was called to Berlin to work as the head of the Imperial Health Office, where he successfully isolated the bacterium that causes tuberculosis. He was the first person in history to identify a disease-causing microorganism and was rewarded for his work with the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1905.

Robert Koch lived in an age of magical discovery, an era of new research – and he was at the forefront, traveling the globe in search of disease-causing pathogens. In Egypt and India he discovered the bacterium responsible for cholera; in Rhodesia (present-day Zimbabwe) he researched cattle plague and hoof and mouth disease, and malaria in Italy, eastern Africa and Indonesia.

He is considered around the world as one of the founders of modern tropical medicine and microbiology. He developed methods of growing bacteria that are still in use by microbiologists around the world.

To this day he remains the most influential discoverer of bacteria. So influential that the United Nations declared March 24th, the day Koch presented his findings on the tuberculosis bacterium and how he discovered it, to be International Tuberculosis Day. Today his name adorns the German federal institution responsible for disease control and prevention. Founded specifically for him as the Royal Prussian Institute for Infectious Diseases in 1891, the organization's name was officially changed to the Robert Koch Institute 50 years later.

Author: Helle Jeppesen (mrm)
Editor: Stuart Tiffen