Still on the kitchen wall at our summer cottage since 1961 by the lake Majajärvi close to Jyväskylä Finland.
Paul Ehrlich (1854-1915) went to
school at Maria-Magdalenen-Gymnasium, and after that studied medicine at the University in Breslau, Silesia (now Wroclaw in Poland). Alois Alzheimer (1864-1915) was a Professor at the Silesian Friedrich Wilhelm University in Breslau since 1912 till his death December 19, 1915. Ehrlich and Alzheimer are both buried at the Main Cemetery in Frankfurt—the Hauptfriedhof Frankfurt am Main.
Ehrlich and his colleague Sahachiro Hata pioneered methods of targeted drug discovery and in 1909 synthesized compound 606, arsphenamine (branded Salvarsan by Hoechst), that killed the bacterium Treponema palladium and nothing else. T. palladium causes syphilis, an infectious disease and a major cause of death in the 1800s. Salvarsan was the drug for syphilis until the 1940s, when it was replaced by penicillin, a safer drug with less side effects compared to compound 606, which derived from the molecular background of arsenic. At the time, 606 was the magic bullet, zauberkugel, as Ehrlich called it. The origin for the idea of zauberkugel was very simple: Erhlich had experimented with various dyes and found that methylene blue stained Mycobacterium tuberculosis (and, interestingly, axons of neurons). So, if a ‘toxic’ compound could be found that bound only to the disease-causing bacterium, it could do magic: kill the bacteria, do no harm and cure the disease. No wonder, Paul Ehrlich is also the father of chemotherapy. In 1908, Paul Ehrlich and Ilya Mechinov shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine “in recognition of their work on immunity”
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/1908/ehrlich/facts/
Alzheimer . . .
For his 1888 doctoral thesis ‘On the Earwax Glands’, Alzheimer draw by hand many pictures to describe what he saw under light microscope, pictures comparable in detail and beauty to those of Ramon Santiago y Cajal.
March 9, 2017, invited by Jeff Ram, I gave a talk Alzheimer’s drug discovery: Wo Sind die Magischen Kugeln? at Wayne State University School of Medicine, Department of Physiology, Detroit, Michigan, USA. It was my first talk on Alzheimer (amyloid) mafia, and per Jeff’s request, the first on astrocyte glutamate transporter EAAT2 as a novel drug target in Alzheimer disease.
My brother and I did a lot of work on Ehrlich for his centenary in 2015. We made this Ehrlich centenary video which was shared at the Paul Ehrlich institute’s opening centenary ceremony (you may have already seen it): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWn3JnCEc24 My brother Zaheer did the editing (he’s very good at these videos).
LINKS:
https://archive.org/details/dr.-ehrlichs-magic-bullet
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?go=Go&search=Zauberkugeln&ns0=1
Paul Ehrlich (1854-1915) went to school at Maria-Magdalenen-Gymnasium, and after that studied medicine at the University in Breslau, Silesia (now Wroclaw in Poland). Alois Alzheimer (1864-1915) was a Professor at the Silesian Friedrich Wilhelm University in Breslau since 1912 till his death December 19, 1915. Ehrlich and Alzheimer are both buried at the Main Cemetery in Frankfurt—the Hauptfriedhof Frankfurt am Main.
Ehrlich and his colleague Sahachiro Hata pioneered methods of targeted drug discovery and in 1909 synthesized compound 606, arsphenamine (branded Salvarsan by Hoechst), that killed the bacterium Treponema palladium and nothing else. T. palladium causes syphilis, an infectious disease and a major cause of death in the 1800s. Salvarsan was the drug for syphilis until the 1940s, when it was replaced by penicillin, a safer drug with less side effects compared to compound 606, which derived from the molecular background of arsenic. At the time, 606 was the magic bullet, zauberkugel, as Ehrlich called it. The origin for the idea of zauberkugel was very simple: Erhlich had experimented with various dyes and found that methylene blue stained Mycobacterium tuberculosis (and, interestingly, axons of neurons). So, if a ‘toxic’ compound could be found that bound only to the disease-causing bacterium, it could do magic: kill the bacteria, do no harm and cure the disease. No wonder, Paul Ehrlich is also the father of chemotherapy. In 1908, Paul Ehrlich and Ilya Mechinov shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine “in recognition of their work on immunity”
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/
medicine/1908/ehrlich/facts/
Alzheimer . . .
For his 1888 doctoral thesis ‘On the Earwax Glands’, Alzheimer draw by hand many pictures to describe what he saw under light microscope, pictures comparable in detail and beauty to those of Ramon Santiago y Cajal.
March 9, 2017, invited by Jeff Ram, I gave a talk Alzheimer’s drug discovery: Wo Sind die Magischen Kugeln? at Wayne State University School of Medicine, Department of Physiology, Detroit, Michigan, USA. It was my first talk on Alzheimer (amyloid) mafia, and per Jeff’s request, the first on astrocyte glutamate transporter EAAT2 as a novel drug target in Alzheimer disease.
My brother and I did a lot of work on Ehrlich for his centenary in 2015. We made this Ehrlich centenary video which was shared at the Paul Ehrlich institute’s opening centenary ceremony (you may have already seen it): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWn3JnCEc24 My brother Zaheer did the editing (he’s very good at these videos).
LINKS:
https://archive.org/details/dr.-ehrlichs-magic-bullet
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Special:Search?go=Go&search=Zauberkugeln&ns0=1