The war on microbes
14 steps · 1570 – 2020
For millennia epidemics were punishment or miasma. In four centuries we learned to see the enemy, understand how it spreads and beat it with vaccines and antibiotics.
▶ Play on the globe- 1c. 1567-1572 · Taiping, Huangshan, Anhui, China · Invention or technique
Nasal variolation (China)
Chinese physicians blow smallpox scabs into the noses of healthy children: they fall mildly ill and are protected. It is the first immunisation, with no idea yet of the cause.
🌍 View on the globe - 2c. 1670-1674 · Delft, Netherlands · Scientific instrument
Leeuwenhoek single-lens microscope
With tiny lenses he ground himself, Leeuwenhoek sees «animalcules» in a drop of water and in the plaque on his teeth. The enemy exists, but nobody links it to disease.
🌍 View on the globe - 31796 · Berkeley, Gloucestershire, England, United Kingdom · Invention or technique
Smallpox vaccine
Jenner inoculates a boy with cowpox and then shows that smallpox does not take. Safer than variolation, the vaccine gives its name to all the others.
🌍 View on the globe - 41847 · Vienna General Hospital, Austria · Discovery
Hand hygiene against puerperal fever (Semmelweis)
In Vienna, Semmelweis makes doctors wash their hands in chlorinated lime after the autopsy room, and puerperal fever plummets. His colleagues mock him.
🌍 View on the globe - 51854 · Broad Street, Soho, London, England · Discovery
Waterborne cholera transmission (John Snow)
John Snow maps cholera deaths in Soho and they all cluster around a Broad Street pump. He has the handle removed: epidemiology is born.
🌍 View on the globe - 61857-1865 · École Normale Supérieure, Paris, France · Theorem, law or theory
Germ theory (Pasteur)
Pasteur shows that microbes do not arise on their own and that they cause fermentation… and disease. Germ theory replaces miasmas.
🌍 View on the globe - 71867 · Glasgow Royal Infirmary, Scotland · Discovery
Antiseptic surgery (Lister)
Lister applies Pasteur's idea to the operating theatre: carbolic acid on wounds, instruments and dressings. Post-operative infections plunge.
🌍 View on the globe - 81882 · Imperial Health Office, Berlin, Germany · Discovery
Tuberculosis bacillus (Mycobacterium tuberculosis)
Koch isolates the tuberculosis bacillus, the great killer of the nineteenth century, and sets the rules for proving that a microbe causes a disease.
🌍 View on the globe - 91885 · Paris, France · Invention or technique
Rabies vaccine
Pasteur vaccinates Joseph Meister, a boy bitten by a rabid dog, with attenuated virus. He survives: vaccines can be made in the laboratory.
🌍 View on the globe - 101892-1898 · Delft, Netherlands (and Saint Petersburg, Russia) · Discovery
Filterable virus (Ivanovsky, Beijerinck)
Ivanovsky and Beijerinck find that something able to sicken tobacco passes through filters that stop bacteria. There is an even smaller enemy: the virus.
🌍 View on the globe - 111928–1943 · London (St Mary's Hospital, Paddington), England · Invention or technique
Penicillin
A mould contaminates one of Fleming's plates and kills the bacteria around it. Florey and Chain turn it into a drug: the age of antibiotics begins.
🌍 View on the globe - 121943 · Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey, United States · Discovery
Streptomycin
Schatz and Waksman find in a soil bacterium the first effective drug against tuberculosis, Koch's bacillus.
🌍 View on the globe - 131955 · University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States (Salk); Cincinnati (Sabin, oral, 1961) · Invention or technique
Polio vaccine (Salk and Sabin)
Salk's vaccine, and then Sabin's oral one, halts polio, which paralysed thousands of children every summer. Today it is on the brink of eradication.
🌍 View on the globe - 142020 · BioNTech, Mainz, Germany, with Pfizer; Moderna, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States · Invention or technique
mRNA vaccine (COVID-19)
After decades of work by Karikó and Weissman, mRNA vaccines against COVID-19 are designed in days and rolled out in under a year.
🌍 View on the globe