Paul Ehrlich Magic Bullet

10 Key excerpts on "Paul Ehrlich Magic Bullet"

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  Germ Theory

  Medical Pioneers in Infectious Diseases

  • Robert P. Gaynes(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • ASM Press

    (Publisher)

  Paul Ehrlich and the Magic Bullet • 217 thought the idea was madness. There were problems with this theory that began to cause difficulties for Ehrlich. For example, critics asked how the body could pos- sibly have prepared receptors for such a bewildering variety of potential antigens, biological and chemical. The side chain theory fell out of favor, awaiting immu- nologists and geneticists who determined the mechanisms by which immunologic diversity could occur. Ehrlich became impatient with the criticism. He countered some, but not all, of the criticisms with further experiments, but he began to turn his attention to developing a receptor theory using chemicals, not the body’s immune defenses. His side chain theory suggested to Ehrlich that there was a spe- cific interaction between the antitoxin and toxin, as specific as a key fitting a lock. He began to take his concept of chemical specificity with dyes and cells from his doctoral thesis and put it together with the key-and-lock receptor theory. He theo- rized that it should be possible to isolate or synthesize small chemicals that would act specifically on an infecting microorganism, leaving the host unaffected. He would spend most of the remainder of his life looking for the “magic bullet.” THE MAGIC BULLET: THE DAWN OF CHEMOTHERAPY FOR INFECTIOUS DISEASES Today, we take for granted the concept of treating infectious diseases using drugs. But aside from quinine, chemicals or drugs that could effectively treat infections were rare before the beginning of the 20th century. There was no standardized method to search for them. Quinine was discovered by accident. It took over a century to even figure out what the active ingredient in Cinchona bark was. Many of the major causative bacteria were identified in the late 19th century. But diagno- sis did not immediately lead to treatment. How would one even start a search for such medicines? Paul Ehrlich developed the theory and the method.

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  Microbe Hunters

  The Classic Book on the Major Discoveries of the Microscopic World

  • Paul de Kruif(Author)
  • 2024(Publication Date)
  • Harvest

    (Publisher)

  12

  Paul Ehrlich

  The Magic Bullet

  1

  Two hundred and fifty years ago, Antony Leeuwenhoek, who was a matter-of-fact man, looked through a magic eye, saw microbes, and so began this history. He would certainly have snorted a contemptuous Dutch sort of snort at anybody who called his microscope a magic eye.

  Now Paul Ehrlich—who brings this history to the happy end necessary to all serious histories—was a gay man. He smoked twenty-five cigars a day; he was fond of drinking a seidel of beer (publicly) with his old laboratory servant and many seidels of beer with German, English and American colleagues; a modern man, there was still something medieval about him for he said: “We must learn to shoot microbes with magic bullets.” He was laughed at for saying that, and his enemies cartooned him under the name “Doktor Phantasus.”

  But he did make a magic bullet! Alchemist that he was, he did something more oudandish than that, for he changed a drug that is the favorite poison of murderers into a saver of the lives of men. Out of arsenic he concocted a deliverer from the scourge of that pale corkscrew microbe whose attack is the reward of sin, whose bit is the cause of syphilis, the ill of the loathsome name. Paul Ehrlich had a most weird and wrong-headed and unscientific imagination: that helped him to make microbe hunters turn another corner, though alas, there have been few of them who have known what to do when they got around that corner, which is why this history has to stop with Paul Ehrlich.

  Of course, it is sure as the sun following the dawn of to-morrow, that the high deeds of the microbe hunters have not come to an end; there will be others to fashion magic bullets. And they will be waggish men and original, like Paul Ehrlich, for it is not from a mere combination of incessant work and magnificent laboratories that such marvelous cures are to be got. . . . To-day? Well, to-day there are no microbe hunters who look you solemnly in the eye and tell you that two plus two makes five. Paul Ehrlich was that kind of a man. Born in March of 1854 in Silesia in Germany, he went to the gymnasium at Breslau, and his teacher of literature ordered him to write an essay, subject: “Life is a Dream.”

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  Microbe 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)

  PAUL EHRLICH

  The Magic Bullet

  I

  Two hundred and fifty years ago, Antony Leeuwenhoek, who was a matter-of-fact man, looked through a magic eye, saw microbes, and so began this history. He would certainly have snorted a contemptuous Dutch sort of snort at anybody who called his microscope a magic eye.

  Now Paul Ehrlich—who brings this history to the happy end necessary to all serious histories—was a gay man. He smoked twenty-five cigars a day; he was fond of drinking a seidel of beer (publicly) with his old laboratory servant and many seidels of beer with German, English and American colleagues; a modern man, there was still something medieval about him for he said: “We must learn to shoot microbes with magic bullets.” He was laughed at for saying that, and his enemies cartooned him under the name “Doktor Phantasm.”

  But he did make a magic bullet! Alchemist that he was, he did something more outlandish than that, for he changed a drug that is the favorite poison of murderers into a saver of the lives of men. Out of arsenic he concocted a deliverer from the scourge of that pale corkscrew microbe whose attack is the reward of sin, whose bit is the cause of syphilis, the ill of the loathsome name. Paul Ehrlich had a most weird and wrong-headed and unscientific imagination: that helped him to make microbe hunters turn another corner, though alas, there have been few of them who have known what to do when they got around that corner, which is why this history has to stop with Paul Ehrlich.

  Of course, it is sure as the sun following the dawn of to-morrow, that the high deeds of the microbe hunters have not come to an end; there will be others to fashion magic bullets. And they will be waggish men and original, like Paul Ehrlich, for it is not from a mere combination of incessant work and magnificent laboratories that such marvelous cures are to be got . . . To-day? Well, to-day there are no microbe hunters who look you solemnly in the eye and tell you that two plus two makes five. Paul Ehrlich was that kind of a man. Born in March of 1854 in Silesia in Germany, he went to the gymnasium at Breslau, and his teacher of literature ordered him to write an essay, subject: “Life is a Dream.”

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  Case Studies in Public Health

  • Theodore H. Tulchinsky(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Academic Press

    (Publisher)

  th century, building on the work of Louis Pasteur. The methodologies of microbiology were greatly advanced by Robert Koch, in Germany, discoverer of tuberculosis, anthrax and cholera organisms and establishing criteria of proof for the “Germ Theory” causation of disease by microbial agents. Paul Ehrlich later developed the “magic bullet” of Salvarsan chemotherapy for treating syphilis. The pioneering work and findings of Koch and Ehrlich were recognized by Nobel Prizes, awarded to Koch in 1905 and to Ehrlich in 1908, respectively. These scientific pioneers provided the foundation for development of microbiology and immunology as well as the search for magic bullets to cure not only infectious diseases but others as well such as cancers. Current research is working to develop specific treatments based on genetic studies of the patient for “personalized magic bullets” now being developed as “precision medicine” to treat cancer and improve survival. The biomedical model is still a cornerstone of public health and overlaps with health protection and health promotion aspects as well as priority setting and good management of limited health resources.

  Keywords

  Paul Ehrlich; Robert Koch; syphilis; salvarsan; “Magic Bullets”; Koch’s postulates; anthrax; tuberculosis; cholera; Germ Theory

  Robert Koch (1843–1910); German physician and a key founder of bacteriology and microbiology; discovered the organism of anthrax in 1876, of tuberculosis in 1882, and cholera in 1883; formulated Koch’s postulates of disease causation; awarded the 1905 Nobel Prize in Physiology for Medicine.

  Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Robert_Koch .

  Paul Ehrlich (1854 –1915) German-Jewish physician and scientist; pioneer in hematology, immunology, and antimicrobial chemotherapy; awarded Noble Prize in 1908 with Ilya Mechnikov for their work on immunity; discoverer of Salvarsan in 1909, the first effective treatment for syphilis, dubbed “the Magic Bullet”.

  Wikimedia Commons Available at: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/05/Paul_Ehrlich_1915.jpg/800px-Paul_Ehrlich_1915.jpg (accessed 12 November 2017).

  Photomicrograph of Bacillus anthracis bacteria using Gram’s stain technique; ultrastructural morphology of numerous rod-shaped, Bacillus anthracis bacteria, many of which had formed long chain configurations.

  Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Anthrax Photos ID# 2226 Available at:https://phil.cdc.gov/ImageIDSearch.aspx?key=true .

  Close-up of a Mycobacterium tuberculosis culture revealing this organism’s colonial morphology.

  Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Public Health Image Library (PHIL), ID no. #4428 Available at: https://phil.cdc.gov/Details.aspx?pid=4428

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  Ten Drugs

  How Plants, Powders, and Pills Have Shaped the History of Medicine

  • Thomas Hager(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Abrams Press

    (Publisher)

  Zauberkugeln , magic balls. Today we use another term. Imagine a police detective chases a murderer into a packed theater lobby. The cop pulls out a gun and, without aiming, shoots it into the middle of the crowd. No worries: His gun is loaded with magic bullets that zip and dodge around the innocents and find their way to just a single target, the murderer, killing the culprit without harming anyone else in the room.

  That’s what Ehrlich envisioned: a drug that acted like a magic bullet. A medicine that would kill only the invader, leaving the patient whole. Today we call them “magic bullet drugs.”

  Ehrlich spent years trying to turn his inspiration into medicine. After making and testing hundreds of chemicals, enduring failure after failure, in 1909 he came up with a dye-based medicine that seemed to work, at least against one kind of bacteria. He named it Salvarsan. It was rough stuff, a dye-like core linked to arsenic as its poison, and it caused terrible side effects. But it worked to stop syphilis, a killer even more horrible than Ehrlich’s medicine. Before Salvarsan there had been no cure for this increasingly common disease. Now there was a modern, high-tech cure that came out of a scientific laboratory.

  Ehrlich’s Salvarsan was not a very good magic bullet—it was too toxic for normal tissues and only worked against one disease—but it proved that a scientist could design a new chemical made to stop a bacterial infection, and that it could work. That was stunning.

  Paul Ehrlich. Photograph, 1915. Wellcome Collection

  And it led nowhere. Despite throwing himself into the search for more magic bullets, Ehrlich never found another. Neither did any other researchers through the 1910s and 1920s. Maybe Salvarsan had been a fluke. Most scientists gave up the search.

  Bayer was one of the few companies to stick with this line of research. In the 1920s the German company went all-in on the hunt for another antibacterial. To do it, the company invested in and created something new: a large-scale, integrated process devoted to the creation, testing, and marketing of new synthetic drugs. Instead of relying on the hit-and-miss inspirations of an individual genius like Ehrlich, the Bayer labs would bring teams of technicians, modern corporate organization, and lots of money to the field, turning drug development into a factory operation—an assembly line for discovery. They would do for drugs what Henry Ford had done for cars in America.

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  One World, Big Screen

  Hollywood, the Allies, and World War II

  • M. Todd Bennett(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • The University of North Carolina Press

    (Publisher)

  1 THE “MAGIC BULLET” HOLLYWOOD, WASHINGTON, AND THE MOVIEGOING PUBLIC In the 1940 Warner Bros. film Dr. Ehrlich’s Magic Bullet, actor Edward G. Robinson plays Dr. Paul Ehrlich, the real-life Nobel Prize–winning German physician who discovered a cure for syphilis. A founder of what became known as chemotherapy, the doctor’s remedy involved a pharmacological “magic bullet,” a chemical toxin that selectively targeted and killed disease-causing organisms. Neither he nor his biopic addressed propaganda’s effectiveness. But another “magic bullet” theory, so prominent as to be conventional social scientific wisdom at the time of the picture’s release, did. Also called the “hypodermic needle” model, it boldly asserted that propaganda exerted tremendous power over people by subcutaneously injecting data into the body politic that, like a chemical toxin, eradicated countervailing beliefs, implanted new ideas, and thereby manufactured thoughts and actions. In short, there was widespread agreement that propaganda worked, that it could condition human behavior. No mass communication technology appeared to carry greater influence, for good or ill, than cinema. No other medium, not even radio, matched film’s sensory appeal, its audibility and visibility, in the pretelevision age. Movies were consumed in darkened theaters, immersive environments where viewers were said to be transfixed by what appeared before them on the big screen. Hollywood, maker of the planet’s most popular movies, only multiplied the effect. Hundreds of millions of people worldwide attended theaters each week, and observers documented, sometimes disapprovingly, the apparent ease with which Hollywood pictures made strong and lasting impressions on suggestible viewers

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  The Molecularisation of Security

  Medical Countermeasures, Stockpiling and the Governance of Biological Threats

  • Christopher Long(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Aminov 2010 : 2). This idea was developed in connection with two other factors of understanding linked to the germ theory of disease.

  Firstly, the idea of a magic bullet was based on the observation of the nature of infectious disease and in particular the understanding that diseases could be caused by outside agents and external causes. Before this, the occurrence of disease was predominantly explained through the spread of ‘bad air’ or miasmas. The theory of infection first emerged in the 16th century and had to be confirmed by the work of Louis Pasteur and the field of scientific microbiology founded by Robert Koch (Drews 1999 : 61). The idea that microorganisms shared our environment and caused disease, the basis of ‘germ theory’, remained controversial well into the 19th century. The arguments within this theory, advanced by Pasteur and Koch, would eventually be formally endorsed by the French Academy of Sciences in 1864 (Levy 2002 : 16).

  Working with Bacillus anthracis, Koch developed three postulates or guidelines establishing a standard of evidence for the microbial cause of infectious disease (Fredricks and Relman 1996 : 19). These postulates included the fact that (1) the parasite occurs in every case of the disease in question and under circumstances which can account for the pathological changes and clinical course of the disease; (2) the parasite occurs in no other disease as a fortuitous and non-pathogenic parasite and (3) after being fully isolated from the body and repeatedly grown in pure culture, the parasite can induce the disease anew (Fredricks and Relman 1996 : 19). Following acceptance of this view, many of the afflictions of the human body could now be attributed to a single microbial cause, with specific bacteria identified with particular diseases (Levy 2002 : 16–7). Indeed, the germ theory of disease first identified and categorised contagious agents as necessary causes of disease (Caduff 2015 : 30–31). This categorisation has been linked to proto-ideas or pre-ideas which attributed the cause of disease to invisible living agents long before this theory of infection and even the invention of the microscope (Fleck 1981

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  Life Saving Drugs

  The Elusive Magic Bullet

  • John Mann(Author)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • Royal Society of Chemistry

    (Publisher)

  He initially called the combining moiety on the side-chain a haptophore and the toxin was the toxophore , but later used the expression receptor to describe the site at which a foreign organism or drug interacted with the cell. This term is now central to pharmacological terminology. His views on what we would now call immunotherapy and chemotherapy are probably best summarised in his own words: “What makes serum therapy so extraordinarily active is the fact that the protecting substances of the body are products of the organism themself, and that they act purely parasitotropically and not organotropically (i.e., against the body). Here we may speak of magic bullets which aim exclusively at the dangerous intruding parasites, strangers to the organism, but do not touch the organism itself and its cells … . But we know of a number of infectious dis-eases … where serum therapy either does not work at all … . I call attention especially to malaria, to the diseases caused by trypanosomes … . In these cases chemical substances must come to aid the treatment. Instead of serum therapy, chemotherapy must be used.” This work in the newly emerging area of immunology occupied Ehrlich for more than a decade, and as a consequence, his research on drug design did not begin in earnest until the turn of the century. At that time, the only drug that had curative properties against a disease (malaria) was quinine and this had been in use since the 17th century, generally in the form of Jesuits’ powder, an extract of the bark of the cinchona tree. Ehrlich had been involved with one study (in 1891) of the effect of the dye methylene blue on malaria, The Elusive Magic Bullet: Introduction 3 and this had been encouraging, in that some amelioration of the symptoms characteristic of the disease had been observed.

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  March of the Pigments

  Color History, Science and Impact

  • Mary Virginia Orna(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Royal Society of Chemistry

    (Publisher)

  In 1886, doing staining with the dye methylene blue led him to consideration of what he called “localized organ therapy.” In other words, he discovered that methylene blue had a special affinity for nerve cells and wondered if similar selectivity on the part of other colorants for other types of cells might exist. In particular, if a dye were to have an affinity for a disease-causing organism, then it might also be possible to target that organism. He took this idea a step further: if a toxin acted in a similar manner as the molecule, then one could deliver a toxin to that organism along with the agent of selectivity. Using this principle, he successfully treated certain experimental infections of the trypanosome parasite with azo dyes. 49 The fixing of the dyes could be by either of two mechanisms, the first like lake formation – the combination of the dye with a constituent of the fabric to form an insoluble salt-like compound – thus immobilizing or localizing the drug. The second, the formation of solid solutions, where the dye forms a homogeneous mixture with the substance of the fabric. He suggested that certain drugs might be fixed in cells through a similar process. 50 This idea formed the theoretical basis for his work on chemotherapy, and the technique became popularly known as the “magic bullet” technique, the use of a drug that would kill only the agent being targeted. In 1940, Warner Bros. released a popular film, “Dr Ehrlich's Magic Bullet,” based on this work starring Edward G. Robinson in the title role. 51 Figure 15.5 52 shows Ehrlich in his study. Figure 15.5 Paul Ehrlich in his “Arbeitszimmer” (workspace). Reproduced from ref. 52. Ehrlich was an innately intelligent man who was not afraid to learn from others and not afraid to change his mind. He was also a keen observer who thought about what he observed, asking for the chemical reasons behind the observation, and then devising brilliant and novel experimental methods for verification

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  Paul Ehrlich's Receptor Immunology

  The Magnificent Obsession

  • Arthur M. Silverstein(Author)
  • 2001(Publication Date)
  • Academic Press

    (Publisher)

  He sought to develop those toxic chemical compounds that could attach to receptors on the surface of the pathogen to effect its destruction, while unable to attach to the cells of the host due to the absence of such receptors. Here would be the specific chemotherapeutic agent, the perfect magic bullet that would achieve Ehrlich's ultimate aim, a therapia magna sterilisans. It is clear that this preoccupation—indeed, obsession^—with receptors pro-vided a continuity of approach that in Ehrlich's hands made him a leader in many fields. It contributed to his being named a father of the field of hematology,^ his E H R L I C H ' S S C I E N T I F I C STYLE 139 recognition as one of the founders of the discipHne of immunology,^ as a signifi-cant contributor to experimental oncology,^ and as the founder of scientific phar-macology.^ But even Ehrlich would have admitted that a guiding precept alone is not sufficient to ensure success. He would add to this what he called The Four Big G's: Geduldy Geschick, Geld, and GlUck (patience, ability, money, and luck). A CHEMIST'S APPROACH From his earliest days as a medical student, Ehrlich was attracted by the vari-ety of highly colored dyes that poured forth from the growing German dye indus-try. He would, in later life, establish close ties to synthetic organic chemists in the industry, would hire several at his Frankfurt Institute, and would discuss molecu-lar structure and function in many of his letters. He would not only propose the synthesis of special dye derivatives, but would even make suggestions about which reactions to employ to achieve the desired result. As he would say later,'^ he could see in his mind's eye the three-dimensional structure of a complicated compound. This disposition to think in organic chemical terms would exert a strong influence on both his immmunology and his chemotherapy.

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