Robert Koch

Robert Koch was born in Clausthal, Germany, the son of a mining official, one of thirteen children. He studied medicine at Göttingen and became a country doctor in Wollstein. His wife gave him a microscope for his birthday, and in a small laboratory in his home he studied anthrax, a disease that killed cattle and sheep. In 1876 he showed that a particular bacterium causes anthrax and traced its full life cycle, the first time a specific germ was proved to cause a specific disease. He developed ways to grow bacteria on solid gelatin and agar plates, to stain them, and to photograph them. In 1882 he announced that he had found the bacterium that causes tuberculosis, then one of the leading causes of death. In 1883, in Egypt and India, he identified the bacterium that causes cholera, and showed that it spreads through contaminated water. He set out rules, called Koch's postulates, for proving that a germ causes a disease. A remedy he announced for tuberculosis failed. He received the Nobel Prize in 1905 and died in 1910.

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