Paul Ehrlich

Origins and early life

Paul Ehrlich was born at Strehlen in Prussian Silesia, now Strzelin in Poland, on 14 March 1854, the second child of Rosa Weigert and Ismar Ehrlich, an innkeeper and distiller who led the town's Jewish community.

Work and career

At the Maria-Magdalenen school in Breslau, inspired by his cousin Karl Weigert, who owned one of the first microtomes, he became fascinated by staining tissue for the microscope, and the fascination never left him: the dyes he developed made it possible to tell one kind of blood cell from another, and so to diagnose diseases of the blood. From staining came his central idea. If a dye fastens on one kind of cell and not another, then a substance might in principle be built to seek out a microbe and leave the patient alone — the magic bullet, as he called it, and chemotherapy, as he named the pursuit of it.

Recognition

He shared the 1908 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Élie Metchnikoff for his side-chain theory of immunity, which held that cells carry chemical side chains to which toxins bind, and that surplus side chains are released into the blood as antibodies. Then, with his assistant Sahachiro Hata, he tested arsenic compound after arsenic compound against the spirochaete that causes syphilis until number 606 worked.

Marketed by Hoechst from late 1910 as Salvarsan, it was the first drug designed against a named pathogen, and it remained the treatment for syphilis until penicillin arrived in the 1940s. He died at Bad Homburg on 20 August 1915.