Paul Ehrlich
German physician and dye chemist who launched chemotherapy with Salvarsan and shared the 1908 Nobel Prize.
via Wikipedia: Paul Ehrlich · see source
Paul Ehrlich (1854–1915) was a German physician and scientist whose work joined chemistry to medicine. His experiments with dyes let doctors tell the different kinds of blood cells apart, and his laboratory produced arsphenamine, sold as Salvarsan, the first effective drug against syphilis and the first antimicrobial medicine. He coined the idea of chemotherapy and the image of a magic bullet aimed at one pathogen, and he shared the 1908 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Élie Metchnikoff for work on immunity.
Quick Facts
- Born
- 14 March 1854
- Birthplace
- Strehlen, Silesia Province, Prussia
- Died
- 20 August 1915, 14 March 1854
- Place of death
- Bad Homburg, Hesse-Nassau, German Empire
- Field
- Immunology
- Education
- University of Breslau
- University of Straßburg
- University of Freiburg
- University of Leipzig
- Known for
- Chemotherapy
- Immunology
- Basophil
- Magic bullet
- Mast cell
- Receptor theory
- Side-chain theory
- Ehrlich's reagent
- Thesis year
- 1878
Facts from the source article.
Lore & Background
Ehrlich was born on 14 March 1854 in Strehlen, in the Prussian Province of Silesia, where his father kept an inn. As a pupil in Breslau he became fascinated with staining tissue, an interest sparked by his cousin Karl Weigert. He studied medicine in Breslau and Strasbourg and took his doctorate in Leipzig in 1878 with a thesis on histological staining; in it he described a new cell type he named mast cells. At the Charité in Berlin he used acid, alkaline and new neutral dyes to classify white blood cells, and in 1881 he published a urine test whose solution became known as Ehrlich's reagent. Robert Koch brought him into his institute in 1891, and in 1896 a serum research branch was created for him to lead. The institute moved to Frankfurt am Main in 1899, and from 1906 he also directed the Georg Speyer House, where the syphilis treatment was found in 1909. He died on 20 August 1915 in Bad Homburg.
Reader's Guide
For a chemistry reader, the thread through Ehrlich's career is the behaviour of dyes: which ones bind to which cells. That line runs from his early staining of blood and tissue, through his improvement of Gram staining for bacteria, to the search for a compound that would attack a microbe and leave the patient alone. He also helped develop an antiserum against diphtheria and devised a way to standardise therapeutic serums. The Paul Ehrlich Institute, named for him in 1947, is today Germany's federal institute for vaccines and biomedicines.
Did You Know?
- Ehrlich named mast cells after the German word Mast, a feed used to fatten animals.
- He has been called the father of immunology.
- The bacterial genus Ehrlichia is named after him.
More in Chemists & Biochemists
Spotted an error? Know more?
Reader corrections go straight into our review queue. Suggest an edit · How this site is sourced