Tuberculosis (TB) is one of the leading causes of death worldwide and the second leading infectious killer, only behind COVID-19. It spreads from one person to another through the air and when someone develops active TB disease, it most often affects their lungs.
As of 2020, eight countries account for two-thirds of the total TB cases in the world, with India holding the ignominy of leading the count. The fact that TB is both curable and preventable is the only silver lining, something for which we need to be thankful to Robert Koch, a German physician who discovered the bacteria that causes the disease.
Born to a mining family in Germany in 1843 as the third of 13 children, Koch attended the University of Gottingen and graduated studying medicine in 1866. After serving as a physician in various provincial towns, he was appointed the district medical officer in Wollstein in 1872.
Starts with anthrax
Wool production was a major industry in this region and that meant that Koch saw a fair amount of anthrax patients, with various degrees of severity. Koch believed that these patients were workers who unknowingly ingested a microscopic organism that was in the hide of animal carcasses. Finding himself to be helpless at their sides, Koch was driven to find out the cause of anthrax and even a cure, if possible.
Living in a small home, Koch's consulting area was in the house's parlour. He used a curtain to divide this room in half and set up a small laboratory for himself. When the last patient was out of his consulting room every evening, the doctor then worked in his makeshift laboratory and conducted his research. It took a few months, but in 1876 Koch was able to identify a microbe named bacillus anthracis as the cause of anthrax.
Despite this success, Koch struggled to find a university position that would have enabled him to pursue full-time research. It wasn't until 1880 that he finally got his wish as he was appointed the government advisor to the Imperial Department of Health in Berlin.
Works alone
Equipped with time and the necessary tools, he decided to investigate TB. Even though the dominant thought at that time considered TB to be hereditary, Koch was convinced that it had to be infectious.
Koch locked himself in his lab on an everyday basis, worked alone, and had his answer after almost six months. Koch isolated and determined how to culture mycobacterium tuberculosis, the germ that we now know causes TB.
Special lecture
Far from a convincing lecturer, Koch had his audience spellbound when he presented his findings at the Physiological Society of Berlin on March 24 1882. The sheer beauty and pure logic left them awestruck, leaving them in no doubt that they were witnesses to scientific history. German medical scientist Paul Ehrlich, who went on to win the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1908, was among those in attendance, and he later mentioned it as "the most gripping experience" of his scientific life.
Koch published his lecture “The Etiology, or Cause, of Tuberculosis” in The Berlin Clinical Weekly on April 10, 1882. The deadly nature of TB meant that the discovery wasn’t only carried in leading medical journals, but also made it to the front pages of newspapers worldwide, making Koch popular overnight
Koch also found out the cause of cholera, even though he was unaware that it had already been achieved decades earlier. He also believed that he had a cure for TB when he developed tuberculin. Even though it turned out to be not therapeutic, tuberculin did emerge as a diagnostic tool. Koch's tireless efforts in the field led to him winning the 1905 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine "for his investigations and discoveries in relation to tuberculosis."
Koch's discovery 140 years ago was an important step towards making TB both preventable and curable. The disease, however, continues to wreak havoc as an estimated 10 million people worldwide fell ill and 1.5 million people died because of TB in 2020. There is still plenty to do before TB can become a thing of the past.
