Discuss in detail on history of microbiology.

 Pasteur experiment – germ theory of disease

 Koch’s postulates

 Lister antiseptic technique

 Jenner vaccine

 Ehrlich’s magic bullets.

 Pasteur experiment – germ theory of disease

Louis Pasteur was born in Dole France, married to Marie Laurent and had five
children. Three of his children died of typhoid fever, maybe leading to Pasteur's
drive to save people from disease. He graduated in 1842 from Besancon College
Royal de la Franche with honors in physics, mathematics, Latin, and drawing.
Louis Pasteur later attended Ecole Normale to study physics and chemistry,
specializing in crystals.

In his early research Pasteur worked with the wine growers of France, helping
with the fermentation process to develop a way to pasteurize and kill germs. He
was granted U.S. patent 135,245 for "Improvement in Brewing Beer and Ale
Pasteurization."

Pasteur then worked within the textile industry finding a cure for a disease
affecting silk worms. He also found cures for chicken cholera, anthrax and rabies.

The Pasteur Institute

The Pasteur Institute was opened in 1888. During Louis Pasteur's lifetime it was
not easy for him to convince others of his ideas, controversial in their time but
considered absolutely correct today. Pasteur fought to convince surgeons that
 germs existed and carried diseases, and dirty instruments and hands spread
germs and therefore disease. Pasteur's pasteurization process killed germs and
prevented the spread of disease.

The Germ Theory of Disease

Louis Pasteur's main contributions to microbiology and medicine were;

 instituting changes in hospital/medical practices to minimize the spread of

disease by microbes or germs,

 discovering that weak forms of disease could be used as an immunization

against stronger forms and that rabies was transmitted by viruses too small to be
seen under the microscopes of the time,

 introducing the medical world to the concept of viruses.

Controversy Over Louis Pasteur

A few historians disagree with the accepted wisdom regarding Pasteur and
believe that the evidence points to him as being a plagiarizer and fraud of note,
and that his research was not at all original.

Important Events That Strengthened the Germ Theory

 In 1865, Louis Pasteur was able to prove that the new silk worm disease
affecting the silk industry was caused by a protozoan. He formulated a way to
identify afflicted silkworm moths so that they would be destroyed and would not
infect others. With Pasteur’s ingenuity and expertise, he saved the collapsing silk
industry in Europe. He proved that the “invisible” protozoans cause disease to
the silk worms. Note that the “invisibility” of the protozoans is due to their very
tiny sizes (a few micrometers) which can only be seen under a microscope
(Madigan 2006)
 English surgeon Joseph Lister used the germ theory of disease to promote his
idea that disinfection is necessary to prevent the spread of diseases caused by
microorganisms (Ingraham 2002). He claimed that doctors must disinfect their
hands before surgically operating on a patient because their hands may be
carrying microbes that could cause infection to the patient. They should also
disinfect their hands after the treatment so that they would not spread any
microbe they acquired during the surgical operation. He promoted carbolic acid
(phenol solution) as the disinfectant, knowing that it effectively kills bacteria.
When surgeons found out that the phenol solution has dramatically reduced the
incidence of infections and deaths to patients, more doctors began using it until it
became a standard operating procedure.

 The German physician Robert Koch (Ingraham 2002; Madigan 2006) used the
germ theory of disease to prove that the disease anthrax, which kills cattle and
sheep, is caused by a bacterium. The bacterium was later given the scientific
name: Bacillus anthracis. He drew blood samples from anthrax-infected sheep
and cattle, then isolated and cultured the blood into nutrient broths. After a few
days of incubating the bacterial culture, he injected samples of it into several
healthy animals. Amazingly, the animals became sick and died. He then isolated
and cultured the bacteria found in the blood of these dead animals. He found out
that the bacteria isolated from these dead animals were the same to the bacteria
isolated from the dead sheep and cattle. This experiment proved that microbes
can be transmitted from one organism to another; it also verified the notion that
some diseases can be communicable — not only anthrax, but also others. Koch
later on established his postulates (popularly known as Koch’s Postulates), which
are a sequence of experimental procedures for directly associating a specific
microorganism to a specific disease. These postulates will be discussed in part 4
of this series
  Koch’s postulates

Koch's postulates are a series of conditions that must be met for a microorganism to be
considered the cause of a disease. German microbiologist Robert Koch (1843–1910)
proposed the postulates in 1890.

Koch originally proposed the postulates in reference to bacterial diseases. However,

with some qualifications, the postulates can be applied to diseases caused
by viruses and other infectious agents as well.

According to the original postulates, there are four conditions that must be met for an
organism to be the cause of a disease. Firstly, the organism must be present in every
case of the disease. If not, the organism is a secondary cause of the infection, or is
coincidentally present while having no active role in the infection. Secondly, the
organism must be able to be isolated from the host and grown in the artificial and
controlled conditions of the laboratory. Being able to obtain the microbe in a pure form is
necessary for the third postulate that stipulates that the disease must be reproduced
when the isolated organism is introduced into another, healthy host. The fourth
postulate stipulates that the same organism must be able to be recovered and purified
from the host that was experimentally infected.

Since the proposal and general acceptance of the postulates, they have proven to have
a number of limitations. For example, infections organisms such as some the
bacterium Mycobacterium leprae, some viruses, andprions cannot be grown in artificial
laboratory media. Additionally, the postulates are fulfilled for a human disease-causing
microorganism by using test animals. While a microorganism can be isolated from a
human, the subsequent use of the organism to infect a healthy person is unethical.
Fulfillment of Koch's postulates requires the use of an animal that mimics the human
infection as closely as is possible.

Another limitation of Koch's postulates concerns instances where a microorganism that

is normally part of the normal flora of a host becomes capable of causing disease when
introduced into a different environment in the host (e.g., Staphylococcus aureus), or
when the host's immune system is malfunctioning (e.g., Serratia marcescens.

Despite these limitations, Koch's postulates have been very useful in clarifying the
relationship between microorganisms and disease.

Lister antiseptic technique

By the middle of the nineteenth century, post-operative sepsis infection accounted for
the death of almost half of the patients undergoing major surgery. A common report by
surgeons was: operation successfully but the patient died.

In 1839 the chemist Justin von Liebig had asserted that sepsis was a kind of
combustion caused by exposing moist body tissue to oxygen. It was therefore
considered that the best prevention was to keep air away from wounds by means of
plasters, collodion or resins.

Joseph Lister (1827-1912)

Joseph Lister, a British surgeon, doubted this explanation. For many years he had
explored the inflammation of wounds, at the Glasgow infirmary. These observations had
led him to considered that infection was not due to bad air alone, and that 'wound
sepsis' was a form of decomposition.

Born on the 5 April 1827 in Upton, Essex, Joseph Lister was the son of the British
physicist Joseph Jackson Lister.

Lister's Work

English surgeon Joseph Lister (1827-1912; professor at London's King's College

Hospital) applied this new knowledge of bacteria to develop a successful system of
antiseptic surgery. Concerned about the high rate of infection after surgery, Lister
studied wound healing with the use of a microscope. After reading Pasteur's work, Lister
concluded that microorganisms in the air caused the infection of wounds. Drawing on a
report of the effects of carbolic acid on sewage bacteria, Lister developed an antiseptic
system using the acid. He sprayed a wound and surrounding areas to destroy infectious
organisms and also protected the area from new invasion by bacteria by using multiple-
layer dressings. Lister first used the method successfully in an operation on a
compound fracture of the leg in 1865.

Lister's antiseptic method was not simple, but it was effective. A published account of
his successful application of the technique appeared in The Lancet in 1867 and ignited
controversy (especially since Pasteur's germ theory of disease was still in dispute).
Nevertheless, Listerian anti-septic surgery gained supporters worldwide, especially in
Germany, where the technique was applied somewhat successfully in treating soldiers
during the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871). Doctors in the United States were
especially resistant to the practice of antisepsis. Widespread acceptance came in the
1890s after German bacteriologist Heinrich Koch (1843-1910) effectively proved that
germs cause disease.