Paul Ehrlich was born on March 14, 1854 at Strehlen,
in Upper Silesia*, Germany. He was the son of Ismar Ehrlich and his wife Rosa
Weigert, whose nephew was the great bacteriologist Karl Weigert.
Ehrlich was educated at the Gymnasium at Breslau and subsequently at the Universities
of Breslau, Strassburg, Freiburg-im-Breisgau and Leipzig. In 1878 he obtained
his doctorate of medicine by means of a dissertation on the theory and practice
of staining animal tissues. This work was one of the results of his great interest
in the aniline dyes discovered by W. H. Perkin in 1853.
In 1878 he was appointed assistant to Professor Frerichs at the Berlin Medical
Clinic, who gave him every facility to continue his work with these dyes and
the staining of tissues with them. Ehrlich showed that all the dyes used could
be classified as being basic, acid or neutral and his work on the staining of
granules in blood cells laid the foundations of future work on haematology and
the staining of tissues.
In 1882 Ehrlich published his method of staining the tubercle bacillus that
Koch had discovered and this method was the basis of the subsequent modifications
introduced by Ziehl and Neelson, which are still used today. From it was also
derived the Gram method of staining bacteria so much used by modern bacteriologists.
In 1882 Ehrlich became Titular Professor and in 1887 he qualified, as a result
of his thesis Das Sauerstoffbedürfnis des Organismus (The need of
the organism for oxygen) as a Privatdozent (unpaid lecturer or instructor) in
the Faculty of Medicine in the University of Berlin. Later he became an Associate
Professor there and Senior House Physician to the Charité Hospital in
Berlin.
In 1897 Ehrlich was appointed Public Health Officer at Frankfurt-am-Main and
when, in 1899, the Royal Institute of Experimental Therapy was established at
Frankfurt, Ehrlich became its Director. He also became Director of the Georg
Speyerhaus, which was founded by Frau Franziska Speyer and was built next-door
to Ehrlich's Institute. These appointments marked the beginning of the third
phase of Ehrlich's many and varied researches. He now devoted himself to chemotherapy,
basing his work on the idea, which had been implicit in his doctorate thesis
written when he was a young man, that the chemical constitution of drugs used
must be studied in relation to their mode of action and their affinity for the
cells of the organisms against which they were directed. His aim was, as he
put it, to find chemical substances which have special affinities for pathogenic
organisms, to which they would go, as antitoxins go to the toxins to which they
are specifically related, and would be, as Ehrlich expressed it, «magic
bullets» which would go straight to the organisms at which they were aimed.
To achieve this, Ehrlich tested, with the help of his assistants, hundreds of
chemical substances selected from the even larger number of these that he had
collected. He studied, among other subjects, the treatment of trypanosomiasis
and other protozoal diseases and produced trypan red, which was, as his Japanese
assistant Shiga showed, effective against trypanosomes. He also established,
with A. Bertheim, the correct structural formula of atoxyl, the efficiency of
which against certain experimental trypanosomiases was known. This work opened
a way of obtaining numerous new organic compounds with trivalent arsenic which
Ehrlich tested.
At this time, the spirochaete that causes syphilis was discovered by Schaudinn
and Hoffmann in Berlin, and Ehrlich decided to seek a drug that would be effective
especially against this spirochaete. Among the arsenical drugs already tested
for other purposes was one, the 606th of the series tested, which had been set
aside in 1907 as being ineffective. But when Ehrlich's former colleague Kitasato
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that Hata had succeeded in infecting rabbits with syphilis, asked him to test
this discarded drug on these rabbits. Hata did so and found that it was very
effective.
When hundreds of experiments had repeatedly proved its efficacy against syphilis,
Ehrlich announced it under the name «Salvarsan». Subsequently, further
work on this subject was done and eventually it turned out that the 914th arsenical
substance to which the name «Neosalvarsan» was given, was, although
its curative effect was less, more easily manufactured and, being more soluble,
became more easily administered. Ehrlich had, like so many other discoverers
before him, to battle with much opposition before Salvarsan or Neosalvarsan
were accepted for the treatment of human syphilis; but ultimately the practical
experience prevailed and Ehrlich became famous as one of the main founders of
chemotherapy.
During the later years of his life, Ehrlich was concerned with experimental
work on tumours and on his view that sarcoma may develop from carcinoma, also
on his theory of athreptic immunity to cancer.
The indefatigable industry shown by Ehrlich throughout his life, his kindness
and modesty, his lifelong habit of eating little and smoking incessantly 25
strong cigars a day, a box of which he frequently carried under one arm, his
invariable insistence on the repeated proof by many experiments of the results
he published, and the veneration and devotion shown to him by all his assistants
have been vividly described by his former secretary, Martha Marquardt, whose
biography of him has given us a detailed picture of his life in Frankfurt. In
Frankfurt the street in which his Institute was situated was named Paul Ehrlichstrasse
after him, but later, when the Jewish persecution began, this name was removed
because Ehrlich was a Jew. After the Second World War, however, whe n his birth-place,
Strehlen, came under the jurisdiction of the Polish authorities, they renamed
it Ehrlichstadt, in honour of its great son.
Ehrlich was an ordinary, foreign, corresponding or honorary member of no less
than 81 academies and other learned bodies in Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Denmark,
Egypt, Finland, France, Germany, Great Britain, Greece, Hungary, ltaly, The
Netherlands, Norway, Roumania, Russia, Serbia, Sweden, Turkey, the U.S.A. and
Venezuela. He held honorary doctorates of the Universities of Chicago, Göttingen,
Oxford, Athens and Breslau, and was also honoured by Orders in Germany, Russia,
Japan, Spain, Roumania, Serbia, Venezuela, Denmark (Commander Cross of the Danebrog
Order), and Norway (Commander Cross of the Royal St. Olaf Order).
In 1887 he received the Tiedemann Prize of the Senckenberg Naturforschende Gesellschaft
at Frankfurt/Main, in 1906 the Prize of Honour at the XVth International Congress
of Medicine at Lisbon, in 1911 the Liebig Medal of the German Chemical Society,
and in 1914 the Cameron Prize of Edinburgh. In 1908 he shared with Metchnikoff
the highest scientific distinction, the Nobel Prize.
The Prussian Government elected him Privy Medical Counsel in 1897, promoted
him to a higher rank of this Counsel in 1907 and, in 1911, raised him to the
highest rank, Real Privy Counsel with the title of Excellency.
Ehrlich married, in 1883, Hedwig Pinkus, who was then aged 19. They had two
daughters, Stephanie (Mrs. Ernst Schwerin) and Marianne (Mrs. Edmund Landau).
When the First World War broke out in 1914 he was much distressed by it and
at Christmas of that year he had a slight stroke. He recovered quickly from
this, but his health which had never, apart from a tuberculous infection in
early life which had made it necessary for him to spend two years in Egypt,
failed him, now began to decline and when, in 1915, he went to Bad Homburg for
a holiday, he had, on August 20 of that year, a second stroke which ended his
life.
This autobiography/biography was written at the time of the award and later published in the book series Les Prix Nobel/Nobel Lectures. The information is sometimes updated with an addendum submitted by the Laureate. To cite this document, always state the source as shown above.