Infection and Microbiology
The People (17)
Robert Koch
German country doctor turned founder of medical bacteriology (1843–1910) who identified the anthrax and tuberculosis bacteria and received the 1905 Nobel Prize for his tuberculosis work.
Read the deep dive →Ronald Ross
British army surgeon (1857–1932) who proved in 1897 that mosquitoes carry malaria, an afternoon now marked as Mosquito Day, and won the 1902 Nobel Prize.
Read the deep dive →Alexander Fleming
Scottish bacteriologist (1881–1955) who discovered lysozyme and, in 1928, penicillin at St Mary's in London, sharing the 1945 Nobel Prize with Florey and Chain.
Read the deep dive →Rous Huggins
Peyton Rous found a virus that transmits cancer in chickens, and Charles Huggins showed hormone treatment can shrink prostate cancer; they shared the 1966 Nobel.
Read the deep dive →Selman Waksman
Ukrainian-born American soil microbiologist (1888–1973) whose Rutgers laboratory found streptomycin, the first cure for tuberculosis, earning him the 1952 Nobel Prize.
Read the deep dive →Max Theiler
South African-born scientist (1899–1972) who developed the 17D yellow fever vaccine without ever taking a doctorate and received the 1951 Nobel Prize for it.
Read the deep dive →Paul Hermann Muller
Swiss industrial chemist (1899–1965) who discovered that DDT kills insects carrying typhus and malaria, earning the 1948 Nobel Prize for a chemical that cut both ways.
Read the deep dive →Enders Weller Robbins
John Enders, Thomas Weller and Frederick Robbins grew poliovirus in tissue culture in Boston, opening the way to polio and measles vaccines and the 1954 Nobel.
Read the deep dive →Baruch Blumberg
American physician (1925–2011) who discovered the hepatitis B virus while studying inherited blood differences, devised the method behind its first vaccine and won the 1976 Nobel.
Read the deep dive →William Campbell
Irish-American parasitologist who spent thirty-three years hunting worm-killing drugs at Merck and turned a soil microbe into ivermectin, sharing the 2015 Nobel Prize.
Read the deep dive →Satoshi Omura
Japanese microbiologist and natural-products chemist who found, in a spoonful of soil, the bacterium whose compounds became ivermectin, sharing the 2015 Nobel Prize with William Campbell.
Read the deep dive →Harald zur Hausen
German virologist (1936–2023) who proved that human papillomavirus causes cervical cancer, paving the way for the HPV vaccine and receiving half of the 2008 Nobel Prize.
Read the deep dive →Stanley Prusiner
American neurologist and biochemist who identified prions, infectious proteins behind diseases such as Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, and won the unshared 1997 Nobel Prize after years of scepticism.
Read the deep dive →Alter Houghton Rice
Harvey Alter, Michael Houghton and Charles Rice discovered the hepatitis C virus through transfusion studies, cloning and proof of cause, sharing the 2020 Nobel.
Read the deep dive →Barry Marshall
Australian doctors Robin Warren and Barry Marshall proved that the stomach bacterium Helicobacter pylori causes most ulcers, overturning medical consensus and winning the 2005 Nobel Prize.
Read the deep dive →Barre Sinoussi Montagnier
French virologists Françoise Barré-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier of the Pasteur Institute discovered HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, in 1983 and shared the 2008 Nobel Prize.
Read the deep dive →Kariko Weissman
Hungarian-born scientist Katalin Karikó and American immunologist Drew Weissman discovered the nucleoside-modified mRNA behind COVID-19 vaccines, sharing the 2023 Nobel Prize.
Read the deep dive →Everyone in this group is a Nobel laureate in Physiology or Medicine, grouped by what the prize was awarded for. Finding the organism and killing it: germ theory, the antibiotics, the vaccines, and the antiparasitic and antimalarial drugs that came out of soil microbes and a sweet wormwood plant.
Connections
- All Notable Doctors
- Genetics and Molecular Biology
- Immunology and Immunotherapy
- Metabolism and Nutrition
- Cell Biology and Physiology
- Neuroscience and the Senses
- Medical Technology and Surgery
- Pharmacology
- Nutrition and Orthomolecular
- Contemporary Practitioners
- Public Health and Institutional Medicine