Google Doodle celebrates German physician and microbiologist Robert Koch’s Nobel win
Google on Sunday celebrated German physician and microbiologist Robert Koch’s Nobel prize win with a doodle dedicated to him. On this day in 1905, Koch was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
The founder of microbiology, he is known for his role in producing research that germs caused diseases like tuberculosis, cholera, and anthrax, and for providing experimental support for the concept of infectious disease.
Robert Koch was born in Clausthal, Germany, on 11 December 1843 and he taught himself how to read and write by reading newspapers, much to the awe of his parents. At the age of 19, he began to study natural sciences at the University of Göttingen but changed his course to study medicine and become a physician.
He dedicated his life to studying germs – some of the tiniest of living organisms on Earth – and how they cause infectious diseases. Countless lives have been saved thanks to his role in proving the revolutionary idea that germs cause diseases, and in identifying the bacterium for anthrax, cholera, and tuberculosis.
He developed many basic principles and techniques of modern biology and he inspired a new generation of scientists and “microbe-hunters,” ushering in a Golden Age of bacteriology
During his time, scientists discovered the microorganisms responsible for causing twenty-one different diseases.
Sunday’s Google Doodle illustrates potato slices – the original media he used to isolate pure bacterial cells to help with his research. Koch experimented with potato slices until his assistant, Julius Petri, invented the Petri dish (also depicted in the Doodle, and bearing Koch’s image).
Koch’s name is one of twenty-three scientists, from the fields of hygiene and tropical medicine, featured on the frieze of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine building in Keppel Street, Bloomsbury.
Koch died at the age of 66 on 27 May 2010, a month after a heart attack that he never quite recovered from.
