Biological Sciences
Paul Ehrlich
Paul Ehrlich was a German physician and scientist known for his work in immunology and chemotherapy. He is famous for developing the concept of the "magic bullet," a targeted drug delivery system that could specifically target disease-causing agents without harming healthy cells. Ehrlich's contributions to the understanding of the immune system and his pioneering work in drug development have had a lasting impact on the field of biological sciences.
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10 Key excerpts on "Paul Ehrlich"
eBook - ePub- Ulf Lagerkvist(Author)
- 2003(Publication Date)
- WSPC(Publisher)
Perhaps, this was Paul Ehrlich’s greatest role, as an intellectual leader and inspirer who directed the medical thinking on new and fruitful paths. Today, scientists worldwide certainly look for molecular explanations for all sorts of biomedical problems, and without a doubt, Paul Ehrlich was the man who really opened our eyes to this new line of thought.
eBook - ePub- Theodore H. Tulchinsky(Author)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Academic Press(Publisher)
Simultaneously, advances in molecular biology and genetic research have expedited cancer drug development with an emphasis on “personalized and tailored drugs” that precisely target the specific molecular defects of a cancer patient. This is based on the intellectual and scientific foundations of Paul Ehrlich, the founder of chemotherapy over 100 years ago. His work included three creative periods: he developed histological staining; he carried out ground-breaking work in immunology; he invented chemotherapy. His vision and success in creating the “Magic Bullet” of a successful chemotherapy for syphilis, now enriched by enormous progress in molecular biology and genetics, provide new tools and inspiration for new generations of scientists to develop individualized precision cancer treatments or new Magic Bullets molecular cancer therapeutics.Conclusion
Koch and Ehrlich followed the work of Pasteur, Lister, and others who opened the fields of application of the Germ Theory to scientific bacteriology and immunology later becoming fundamental aspects of medicine and public health. Establishing accepted criteria for proof of causation helped scientists and epidemiologists everywhere to focus on research design and acceptable proof of their investigations.Diseases once thought to be controlled have come back because of failures in achieving complete “herd immunity” of vaccines such as measles, or the development of resistance in organisms to current antibiotics largely due to overuse of antibiotics in animal husbandry and in medical practice, so that resistant strains of antibiotics develop faster than new antibiotics are developed. Antimicrobial resistance is a global challenge to successful management of infectious diseases, and is undermining many other advances in health and medicine. In 2015 the World Health Assembly endorsed a global action plan to tackle antimicrobial resistance—including antibiotic resistance, the most urgent drug resistance trend. The plan focuses on continuity of surveillance and prevention and successful treatment of infectious diseases with effective and safe methods, promoting research for new methods and high-quality antibiotics used responsibly. Complacency and reckless human behavior promote recurrence of diseases transferred by unsafe sex such as syphilis or HIV, or by parental refusal of immunizations for their children.
eBook - PDFGerm Theory
Medical Pioneers in Infectious Diseases
- Robert P. Gaynes(Author)
- 2023(Publication Date)
- ASM Press(Publisher)
Rudolf Virchow’s scientific expertise placed Germany as the leading cellular pathology center in the world in some small part because of the availability of various aniline dyes to stain human tissues. At first, Paul Ehrlich also used these dyes to study human tissues, but later he began to speculate on their therapeutic uses. His efforts set in motion the discovery of new therapeutics and paved the way for an entire pharmaceutical industry for the next century. Curiously, aniline dyes have links to another of Ehrlich’s contributions that sparked a new field—immunology. The achievements of Paul Ehrlich are sometimes overshad- owed by those of some of his contemporaries, like Robert Koch and Joseph Lister. But Ehrlich provided a vital impetus for a revolutionary change in treatment and in the understanding of the body’s defenses against infections. EARLY INFLUENCES Paul Ehrlich was born on 14 March 1854 in the Prussian town of Strehlen (now Sztrelin, in Poland). His father, Ismar Ehrlich, was a prosperous Jewish inn- keeper, described as a man of cheerful manner but detached and odd, sometimes sitting at a window for hours, talking hurriedly to himself. His mother, Rosa Weigert, seemed to compensate for this idiosyncratic behavior, personally tend- ing to customers of the inn and taking wonderful care of the household, which included three daughters in addition to their son. Ehrlich’s grandfather imparted to the boy an interest in natural science and chemistry. Paul Ehrlich seemed to inherit his father’s speedy pattern of speech that seemed to show impatience and nervousness, but he exhibited his mother’s warmth as well. His secretary and biographer, Martha Marquardt, described Ehrlich speaking with vivid forms of 208 • Germ Theory: Medical Pioneers in Infectious Diseases expression, often with visual references (4). His first cousin, Karl Weigert, was 9 years Ehrlich’s senior.
eBook - PDFThe Construction of Analogy-Based Research Programs
The Lock-and-Key Analogy in 20th Century Biochemistry
- Rebecca Mertens(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- transcript Verlag(Publisher)
383-408. Travis, Anthony (1991): Paul Ehrlich: 100 years of chemotherapy, 1891-1991, in: The Biochemist, 13. Travis, Anthony/Reinhardt, Carsten (2000): Heinrich Caro and the creation of modern chemical industry, Dordrecht. Travis, Anthony (2008): Models for biological research: The theory and practice of Paul Ehrlich, in: History and Philosophy of the life sciences, 30, 79-98. Weindling, Paul (1992): Scientific elites and laboratory organization in Fin-de-Siècle Paris and Berlin: The Pasteur Institute and Robert Koch Insti-tute for Infectious Diseases compared, in: Cunningham/Williams (eds.): The laboratory revolution in medicine, Cambridge and New York, pp. 170-188. Wimsatt (2007): Re-Engineering philosophy for limited beings, Cambridge (Ma). Witkop, Bernhard (1999): Paul Ehrlich and his magic bullets –revisited, in: Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 143 (4), pp. 540-557. Wolf, Gerhard (1970): Die BASF. Vom Werden eines Weltunternehmens, München.
eBook - ePubMicrobe Hunters
The Classic Book on the Major Discoveries of the Microscopic World
- Paul de Kruif(Author)
- 2002(Publication Date)
- Harvest(Publisher)
Just the same he was the most exact of men in his experiments. He was the first to cry out against the messy ways of microbe hunters, who searched for truth by pouring a little of this into some of that, and in that laboratory of Robert Koch he murdered fifty white mice where one was killed before, trying to dig up simple laws, to be expressed in numbers, that he felt lay beneath the enigmas of immunity and life and death. And that exactness, though it did nothing to answer those riddles, helped him at last to make the magic bullet.3
Such was the gayety of Paul Ehrlich, and such his modesty—for he was always making straight-faced jokes at his own ridiculousness—that he easily won friends, and he was a crafty man too and saw to it that certain of these friends were men in high places. Presently, in 1896, he was director of a laboratory of his own; it was called the Royal Prussian Institute for Serum Testing. It was at Steglitz, near Berlin, and it had one little room that had been a bakery and another little room that had been a stable. “It is because we are not exact that we fail!” cried Ehrlich, remembering the bubble of the vaccines of Pasteur which had burst, and the balloon of the serums of Behring which had been pricked. “There must be mathematical laws to govern the doings of these poisons and vaccines and antitoxins!” he insisted, so this man with the erratic imagination walked up and down in those two dark rooms, smoking, explaining, expostulating, and measuring as accurately as God would let him with drops of poison broth and calibrated tubes of healing serum.But laws? He would make an experiment. It would turn out beautifully. “You see! here is the reason of it!” he would say, and draw a queer picture of what a toxin must look like and what the chemistry of a body cell must look like, but as he went on working, as regiments of guinea-pigs marched to their doom, Paul Ehrlich found more exceptions to his simple theories than agreements with them. That didn’t bother him, for, such was his imagination, that he invented new little supporting laws to take care of the exceptions, he drew stranger and stranger pictures, until his famous “Side-Chain” theory of immunity became a crazy puzzle, which could explain hardly anything, which could predict nothing at all. To his dying day Paul Ehrlich believed in his silly side-chain theory of immunity; from all parts of the world critics knocked that theory to smithereens—but he never gave it up; when he couldn’t find experiments to destroy his critics he argued at them with enormous hair-splittings like Duns Scotus and St. Thomas Aquinas. When he was beaten in these arguments at medical congresses it was his custom to curse—gayly—at his antagonist all the way home. “You see, my dear colleague!” he would cry, “that man is a SHAMELESS BADGER
eBook - ePubMicrobe Hunters - Figures from the Heroic Age of Medicine
Including Leeuwenhoek, Spallanzani, Pasteur, Koch, Roux, Behring, Metchnikoff, Theobald Smith, Bruce, Ross, Grassi, Walter Reed, & Paul Ehrlich (Read & Co. Science)
- Paul de Kruif(Author)
- 2022(Publication Date)
- Read & Co. Science(Publisher)
Robert Koch—“But wait a moment, my dear Ehrlich! I can't follow you—please explain more clearly!”“Certainly, Herr Doktor! That I can do right off!” Never for a moment does Ehrlich stop talking, but grabs a piece of chalk, gets down on his knees, and scrawls huge diagrams of his ideas over the laboratory floor—“Now, do you see, is that clear?”There was no dignity about Paul Ehrlich! Neither about his attitudes, for he would draw pictures of his theories anywhere, with no more sense of propriety than an annoying little boy, on his cuffs and the bottoms of shoes, on his own shin front to the distress of his wife, and on the shirt fronts of his colleagues if they did not dodge fast enough. Nor could you properly say Paul Ehrlich was dignified about his thoughts, because, twenty-four hours a day he was having the most outrageous thoughts of why we are immune or how to measure immunity or how a dye could be turned into a magic bullet. He left a trail of fantastic pictures of those thoughts behind him everywhere!Just the same he was the most exact of men in his experiments. He was the first to cry out against the messy ways of microbe hunters, who searched for truth by pouring a little of this into some of that, and in that laboratory of Robert Koch he murdered fifty white mice where one was killed before, trying to dig up simple laws, to be expressed in numbers, that he felt lay beneath the enigmas of immunity and life and death. And that exactness, though it did nothing to answer those riddles, helped him at last to make the magic bullet.III
Such was the gayety of Paul Ehrlich, and such his modesty—for he was always making; straight-faced jokes at his own ridiculousness—that he easily won friends, and he was a crafty man too and saw to it that certain of these friends were men in high places. Presently, in 1896, he was director of a laboratory of his own; it was called the Royal Prussian Institute for Serum Testing. It was at Starlit, near Berlin, and it had one little room that had been a bakery and another little room that had been a stable. “It is because we are not exact that we fail!” cried Ehrlich, remembering the bubble of the vaccines of Pasteur which had burst, and the balloon of the serums of Behring which had been pricked. “There must be mathematical laws to govern the doings of these poisons and vaccines and antitoxins!” he insisted, so this man with the erratic imagination walked up and down in those two dark rooms, smoking, explaining, expostulating, and measuring as accurately as God would let him with drops of poison broth and calibrated tubes of healing serum.
eBook - ePubMarch of the Pigments
Color History, Science and Impact
- Mary Virginia Orna(Author)
- 2022(Publication Date)
- Royal Society of Chemistry(Publisher)
54 But there is one more ingredient that has not been mentioned and is absolutely necessary: Ehrlich was passionate about his subject. He was intrigued, he was curious, he could not delve deeply enough; in short, he was a man in love.15.7 Monoclonal Antibodies
Many years later, the scientific trio of Georges J. F. Köhler (1946–1995), César Milstein (1927–2002), and Niels K. Jerne (1911–1994), still wearing Ehrlich's chemotherapeutical mantle, walked off with the 1984 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their work on monoclonal antibodies.55Early in the twentieth century, Ehrlich, from his tissue staining experience, had postulated that if a dye could be made that directly targeted a specific disease-causing organism that perhaps a toxin could be made to accompany the dye and selectively destroy the organism. This idea, dubbed early on as a “magic bullet” mechanism, was later expanded beyond colored molecules to include any type of molecular toxin delivery system. But Ehrlich's dream was far from being realized as no molecular species was selective enough at the cellular level: this had to wait for an understanding of the antibody-antigen relationship, the technique of cell cloning, and the fusing of different types of cells in the hopes of bringing about the needed antibody specificity.An antigen is an antibody generator, from which the word is derived. An antigen, usually protein in nature, is signaled as a foreign body to a given organism, thus triggering a response on the part of the immune system: the generation of an antibody to combat the invader. A monoclonal antibody is one produced by a single clone of cells, that is, a single cell and its progeny. But what was yet needed was the ability to produce identical antibodies specific to a given antigen, a technique that was finally developed, but not without controversy56 by Cambridge University's Milstein and Köhler, a postdoctoral fellow working in his laboratory.57 Jerne, working out of the Basel Institute for Immunology, developed the theory that buttressed Milstein's and Köhler's work.58
eBook - ePubThe Molecularisation of Security
Medical Countermeasures, Stockpiling and the Governance of Biological Threats
- Christopher Long(Author)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
Ada and Nossal 1987 : 62). This concept would have great significance in the most revolutionary discovery in the field of immunology to date.The discipline and aims of immunology became more established and institutionalised as the 19th century turned into the 20th. Ehrlich’s work on antibodies and his insights into their specific combining sites gained support (Silverstein 1995 : 9). Ehrlich utilised a Darwinian perspective to emphasise the role of evolution in the spontaneous production of a range of different antibodies (Silverstein 1995 : 12). Following the quick discoveries of the antitoxins against diphtheria and tetanus and the development of passive immunisation – the transfer of ready-made antibodies to aid the body’s immune response – a relatively fallow period emerged. As a result, Ehrlich moved from immunology into chemotherapy (Silverstein 1995 : 11) and the application of the chemical dyes in the prevention of disease.Chemotherapy and magic bullets
Ehrlich’s development of a diphtheria antitoxin with von Behring along with passive immunisation and serum therapy earned them both the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1908 (Drews 1999 : 65). This would help cement the therapeutic value of the magic bullet. The drugs and monoclonal antibodies discussed below and analysed in Chapter 5 differ in that drugs are chemically synthesised and monoclonal antibodies are biological products (Bio 2021 ). Yet, despite this, both represent magic bullets in that they ‘go straight to their intended cell-structural targets’ (Strebhardt and Ullrich 2008 : 473). In other words, they selectively intervene in and manipulate the disease-causing pathway of pathogens. A central factor in their working is that they only inhibit disease-causing microbes and not the host (Aminov 2010
eBook - PDF- C. Prüll, A. Maehle, R. Halliwell(Authors)
- 2009(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
Although the side-chain theory provided the basis for Ehrlich’s own research on cancer and chemotherapy 154 and was seen by colleagues as an inspi- ration for further work, there was at first no evidence of its usefulness for immunology or pharmacology in general. 155 As a construction which came into existence as a product of Ehrlich’s social biography, personality 40 A Short History of the Drug Receptor Concept and scientific career development, the receptors were the final stage of a process spiralling up into the enterprise of theoretical research. With his propaganda management and experimental system, Ehrlich was able successfully to adapt his hypothetical receptor system to every new chal- lenge. The decision whether to join Ehrlich or to oppose him, whether to be a ‘pluralist’ or a ‘unitarian’, was similar to a religious confession. One had to believe in ‘the theory’ or to abandon it altogether. 156 It was very much shaped by its creator who tried to increase its credibility through a combination of persuasion and force. But the receptor idea was not only promoted by Ehrlich and his col- laborators but also by John Newport Langley, who is the subject of the next chapter.
eBook - PDFScience as Autobiography
The Troubled Life of Niels Jern
- Thomas Soderqvist, David Mel Paul(Authors)
- 2008(Publication Date)
He held seminars twice a week at the institute and took part regularly in the immunology discussions organized by one of his few friends in Frankfurt, Adolph Wacker, a professor of therapeutic biochemistry. He laid plans for the rebuilding and expansion of the Paul Ehrlich Institute and spent much time in negotiations with government officials. He was entrusted by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft with evaluating applications for grants and became a member of the editorial committee of Current Topics in Microbiology and Im-munology, where he took the initiative of commissioning survey articles on var-ious immunological topics. During the fall he was invited regularly to Euro-pean conferences and seminars, delivering talks on various topics, among them “New Frontiers in Immunology” at the Second International Biophysics Con-ference in Vienna; the regulation of antibody synthesis at an international symposium on organ transplantation in Bad Homburg; “Genetic and Cellular Diversity in Antibody Formation” in Brussels. He talked about the antibody 250 A Man, His Theory, and His Network Like a Log Coming Slowly to the Surface 251 problem at the Max Planck Institute for Experimental Medicine in Göttingen, and gave the opening lecture of the Tenth Anniversary Meeting of the British So-ciety for Immunology in the beginning of November. Through the winter and spring of 1967, the lecture tour continued: “The Antibody Problem” in Geneva in the middle of January;“The Diversity of Antibodies and the Problem of Anti-body Formation” in Leiden in the middle of February; “Origine cellulaire des anticorps” (“a subject of which I think I understand less and less as time goes on”) at the Collège de France a few days later; and “The Problem of Antigen Competition” at the International Symposium on Combined Vaccines in Mar-burg at the end of March. Jerne had become a seasoned lecturer who captured his audience with simple and clear presentations.
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