Pfeiffer
Richard Friedrich Johannes Pfeiffer (1858–1945) Volver a Personas. Cronología. Fuentes.
It was in 1892 that the venerated physician/bacteriologist Richard Friedrich Johannes Pfeiffer (1858–1945), in partnership with physician/bacteriologist Shibasaburo Kitasato (1852–1931), both working in Berlin under Robert Koch (1843–1910), reported the discovery of a new bacterium [7], which Kitasato was able to cultivate and sustain on artificial media [8], and which both scientists claimed to be the cause of pandemic influenza. When their initial, brief, 1892 report was followed up by more extensive data in 1893 [9], the scientific world was taken by storm; it seemed to many that Pfeiffer had taken all of the necessary steps to establish Bacillus influenzae, as he called it, as the true aetiological agent of influenza. (B. influenzae was usually referred to as ‘Pfeiffer’s bacillus’ in the literature of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and is now known as Haemophilus influenzae).
However, although B. influenzae was clearly a pathogenic organism, and was often cultured from fatal cases of influenza, other investigators were unable to confirm Pfeiffer’s strong association, a problem compounded by the apparent disappearance of pandemic influenza within a year or two of Pfeiffer’s discovery. The verdict was unclear, but the notion that B. influenzae was the true cause of influenza persisted up to the time of the next pandemic in 1918 (see below), when Rockefeller scientists Peter Kosciusko Olitsky (1886–1964) and Frederick L Gates (1886–1933) provided strong evidence against a causal association, documenting that the infective influenza agent survived passage through filters that excluded B. influenzae [10].
Despite this bacterial blind alley, it is important to note that most of the deaths during the 1918–1919 influenza pandemic were associated with secondary bacterial invaders (for review of clinical and pathological features of the 1918 pandemic see [11]), among them H. influenzae, which Pfeiffer had discovered. Pfeiffer, a budding 38-year-old researcher at the time of his discovery, went on to have a long and distinguished career as an originator of typhoid vaccination, the discoverer of bacteriolysis (‘Pfeiffer’s phenomenon’), a conceptualizer of endotoxin, the discoverer of the pathogenic organism Micrococcus (now Moraxella) catarrhalis, and a tropical disease investigator of plague (in India) and malaria (in Italy; [12–14]). Kitasato, who had already discovered the cause of tetanus (1889) and had co-developed, with Emil von Behring (1854–1917), both tetanus and diphtheria antitoxins in 1890 [15,16], went on to co-discover the bacterial cause of plague in 1894 [17], and to support his protégé Kiyoshi Shiga (1871–1957) in elucidating the cause of shigellosis in 1898.
(Volver a Personas. Cronología. Fuentes.)
