Paul Ehrlich

Life & Legacy

Paul Ehrlich (German: [ˈpaʊl ˈeːɐ̯lɪç] ; 14 March 1854 – 20 August 1915) was a German physician and scientist who worked in the fields of hematology, immunology and antimicrobial chemotherapy. He shared the 1908 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Élie Metchnikoff "in recognition of their work on immunity". Among his foremost achievements were finding a cure for syphilis in 1909 and inventing an important modification of the technique for Gram staining bacteria. The methods he developed for staining tissue made it possible to distinguish between different types of blood cells, which led to the ability to diagnose numerous blood diseases.
His laboratory discovered arsphenamine (Salvarsan), the first antimicrobial drug and first effective medicinal treatment for syphilis, thereby initiating and also naming the concept of chemotherapy. Ehrlich introduced the concept of a magic bullet. He also made a decisive contribution to the development of an antiserum to combat diphtheria and conceived a method for standardising therapeutic serums. He was the founder and first director of the Paul Ehrlich Institute, a German research institution and medical regulatory body named for him in 1947, that is the nation's federal institute for vaccines and biomedicines. A genus of Rickettsiales bacteria, Ehrlichia, is named after him.
Ehrlich has been called "father of immunology".