Highlights in the History of Microbiology 45 



Paul Ehrlich (1854-1915), what he had heard and seen relative 

 to the etiology of anthrax, Koch found himself with still other 

 followers who all wanted to join in these investigations of microbes. 



This was the year 1876, and Louis Pasteur had made a rather 

 sweeping statement just seven years previously to the effect that 

 man held the power to wipe parasitic maladies from the face of 

 the earth. To say that this pronouncement was scoffed at is to put 

 it mildlv. Koch was now leadino; the fight in that direction, and 

 while we must agree that we still have a long way to go before 

 Pasteur's statement can be fulfilled, the strides we have made 

 would astonish Pasteur, were he to rise today from his tomb 

 in the basement of the Pasteur Institute in Paris. 



Koch's reputation continued to grow, and even though the years 

 immediatelv following his announcement of his anthrax findings 

 were not prosperous ones for this great discoverer, he emerged in 

 1880 with an appointment by the German government to the 

 position of Extra-ordinary Associate of the Imperial Health Office, 

 with a fine, well-equipped laboratory and with assistants to help 

 him in his research activities. People clamored to be allowed to 

 study under him in Germany, and the list of his pupils is a "Who's 

 Who in Microbiology." Laboratory procedures were in a very 

 chaotic state in 1860, and Koch felt that order had to emerge from 

 this chaos if microbiology ever expected to amount to very much. 



If each disease is caused by a single species of microbes, Koch 

 realized that he would have to devise some technic for separating 

 organisms from other organisms. There are few places in nature 

 where a pure culture of an organism can be found. Bacteria are 

 usually mixed with all forms of microscopic and macroscopic life 

 in the keen battles for survival. Fate once again came to Koch's 

 rescue and he was smart enough to capitalize on the chance 

 observation. It seems that a sliced, cooked potato had been left 

 on one of the tables in his laboratory. He happened to observe 

 several colored spots on this potato and his curiousity got the better 

 of him. What are those colored spots? Streaking a little of the 

 pigmented material on a glass slide in a drop of water, Koch was 

 thrilled to find that each spot was composed of a pure culture of 



