Paul Ehrlich- Father of modern Chemotherapy ❤️

Paul Ehrlich was a Nobel Prize-winning German Jewish physician and scientist who worked in the fields of hematology, immunology, and antimicrobial chemotherapy. Among his foremost achievements were finding a cure for syphilis in 1909 and inventing the precursor technique to Gram staining bacteria. 

Born: 14 March 1854, Strzelin, Poland

Died: 20 August 1915, Bad Homburg, Germany

Spouse: Hedwig Pinkus 

Known for: Chemotherapy, Immunology

In 1908, he received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his contributions to immunology. He was the founder and first director of what is now known as the Paul Ehrlich Institute, a German research institution and medical regulatory body that is the nation’s federal institute for vaccines and biomedicine. A genus of Rickettsiales bacteria, Ehrlichia, is named after him.

The magic bullet is a scientific concept developed by a German Nobel laureate Paul Ehrlich in 1900. While working at the Institute of Experimental Therapy (Institut für Experimentalle therapie), Ehrlich formed an idea that it could be possible to kill specific microbes (such as bacteria), which cause diseases in the body, without harming the body itself. He named the hypothetical agent as Zauberkugel, the magic bullet.He envisioned that just like a bullet fired from a gun to hit a specific target, there could be a way to specifically target invading microbes. His continued research to discover the magic bullet resulted in further knowledge of the functions of the body’s immune system, and in the development of Salvarsan, the first effective drug for syphilis, in 1909.