Bartolomeo Gosio

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Bartolomeo Gosio (born March 17, 1863 in Magliano Alfieri , Kingdom of Italy , † April 13, 1944 in Rome ) was an Italian doctor and microbiologist . He discovered a metabolic product with antibiotic properties in a mold and presented it in pure form. This mycophenolic acid was the first well-characterized antibiotic in history. He also showed that some molds can convert inorganic forms of arsenic into a toxic, organic gas. As a result, wallpapers that were printed with inks containing arsenic were recognized as a health hazard. As director of the Scientific Laboratory of the Public Health Service in Rome, he made important contributions to malaria control in Italy from 1899 .

Youth and education

Bartolomeo Gosio was the son of the veterinarian Giacomo Gosio and Antonietta Troya. His father died shortly after he finished elementary school and his mother had to take up a job to finance her child's education at a boarding school in Alba . He then studied medicine for three years at the University of Turin and later moved to the Royal University of Rome , where he received his doctorate magna cum laude and an additional, special honorable mention ( laurea in medicina ) at the age of 25 in 1888 . His first position was at the Laboratory for Bacteriology and Chemistry of the State Hygiene Institute ( Istituto Superiore di Sanità ) in Rome. This was followed by studies with Max Rubner in Berlin, where he also met Robert Koch . In 1899 he became director of the Scientific Laboratory of the Public Health Service ( Laboratori scientifici della Direzione di Sanità ) in Rome.

An arsenic-containing gas from wallpaper

In Gosio's time, wallpapers with colors such as Scheelean green or Schweinfurt green based on metals and semi-metals were popular, although aniline colors had already been developed by William Henry Perkin and others. The British medical magazine The Lancet already feared arsenic poisoning in children who slept in rooms that were papered in this way. Another sign of the toxic effects was the absence of bed bugs .

Even before Gosio, scientists had suspected a connection between wallpapers with arsenic-containing paints and a humid climate and even the production of a gas by mold and bacteria. Gosio described this gas as smelling of garlic. He went in search of the microbes and exposed mashed potatoes with arsenic oxide to the air of a cellar. He examined the molds and bacteria that developed on it to the extent that they smelled of garlic. One fungus in particular - Penicillium brevicaule , in today's terminology Scopulariopsis brevicaulis - metabolized arsenic heavily. The resulting gas was so poisonous that it could kill a rat. On this basis, Gosio developed a bio-test in 1892: the suspect material was extracted with water and concentrated, and the residue was placed on a potato slice with a culture of S. brevicaulis . After a few hours of incubation at 25 to 30 ° C, the garlic odor indicated the presence of arsenic. With this test he was able to detect one microgram of arsenic oxide in one gram of material.

In 1890, Gosio examined the circumstances of over 1,000 deceased children. He found a level of 700 milligrams of arsenic per m² in the wallpaper in the bedrooms. This discovery contributed to a corresponding reaction in the legislature by banning toxic paints. The chemist Frederick Challenger identified the gas as trimethylarsine in 1932 . Recent studies of the toxicity of trimethylarsine appear to show that it is less toxic than assumed. Other arsenic compounds that are also formed, such as arsine ( arsine , AsH 3 ) have a significantly higher toxicity.

The leading wallpaper manufacturer in Great Britain, William Morris (1834–1896), denied that the wallpaper was harmful. In particular, his father was William Morris Sn. Shareholder in the Devonshire Great Consolidated Copper Mining Company , which mined copper and held the largest market share in England for arsenic as a by-product. Today the death of Napoléon Bonaparte in 1821 is also associated with wallpaper colors, since large amounts of arsenic were found in analyzes of his hair in 1995.

Mycophenolic acid as an antibiotic

From 1893 Gosio investigated the vitamin deficiency disease Pellagra , the cause of which he suspected to be a fungal attack on corn. Here he isolated a mold that he then described as Penicillium glaucum , presumably it was actually Penicillium brevicompactum . From the filtrates of this organism he isolated and crystallized a substance with phenolic properties, which he did not give a name because he presumably considered it to be the already known p-hydroxyhydrocinnamic acid. It is now accepted that it was actually mycophenolic acid , which was rediscovered in 1913. The correct structure was not clarified until 1952. Gosio made the significant observation of the little material he had that it hindered the growth of the anthrax pathogen.

It was not until 1945, after the discovery of penicillin, that the hunt for further antibiotics began, that mycophenolic acid was rediscovered at least twice. However, Howard Florey recognized Gosio's accomplishment in a 1946 article. In addition to being an antibiotic, mycophenolic acid has also been used to treat psoriasis . One ester, mycophenolate mofetil , is a potent immunosuppressor used in kidney and heart transplants. Here the ester is hydrolyzed in the body to form free mycophenolic acid. Although Gosio summarized his findings again in 1896, he did not investigate the substance further, probably because he was actually interested in Pellagra.

Further microbiological work

Other research topics of Gosio were the metabolism of cholera and plague bacteria , he examined the color reactions of sulfur bacteria and arbutin as a diagnostic agent for bacterial dysentery . He also constructed an instrument to titrate vaccines directed against bacteria . He extensively investigated the degradation of selenium and tellurium salts by bacteria. From the color change during the reduction of tellurium, he developed an indicator for the bacterial contamination of sera , culture media, etc. In the presence of living bacteria, a gray to black color or a precipitate developed. However, this response was not entirely reliable.

In the public health service

All of the work mentioned is related to public health issues that Gosio worked for. When Robert Koch visited Italy in 1898 to learn more about malaria , he was looked after by Gosio. Koch praised his colleague. However, since there were no joint publications, this cooperation has hardly been noticed by historians. In the following years, Gosio devoted himself increasingly to malaria control, for which he undertook extensive experiments as director of a campaign in the area around Grosseto . This work was later extended to the regions of Calabria and Basilicata . Gosio was also one of the founders of the Malaria Study Center in Nettuno and established summer camps for children suffering from malaria. In the years 1903 to 1914 there was also extensive work on the question of the relationship between tuberculosis in humans and cattle.

Why has Gosio remained largely unknown?

Gosio was awarded prizes such as the Riberi Prize of the Royal Academy of Medicine in Turin in his time and was even proposed for the Nobel Prize in 1922, but his achievement is hardly known today. He published more than 70 magazine articles and seven books in the three languages ​​Italian, French and German, but not in English, which is dominant today. His biographer Ronald Bentley suspects that this language problem in particular hindered his fame. The most important works appeared in Italian in the journal Rivista d'Igiene e Sanità Pubblica , which was hardly read abroad. In the following reviews of microbiology Gosio was not mentioned. It may also play a role that he did not correctly chemically analyze either the arsenic-containing gas or the mycophenolic acid. His death fell during the troubled times of the end of World War II and he received no obituaries in English-language journals. On the other hand, Italian authors have recently been claiming that Gosio discovered the first penicillin, which is clearly wrong.

Publications

(Selection)

  • Azione di alcune muffe sui composti fissi d'arsenico. In: Rivista d'Igiene e Sanità Pubblica . Vol. 3, 1892, pp. 201-230 and 261-273.
  • Contributo all'etiologia della pellagra; ricerche chimiche e batteriologiche sulle alterazioni del mais. In: Giornale della Reale Accademia di Medicina di Torino . Vol. 61, 1893, pp. 484-487.
  • Action de quelques moisissures sure les composés fixes d'arsenic. In: Archives Italiennes de Biologie . Vol. 18, 1893, pp. 253-265.
  • Ricerche batteriologiche e chimiche sulle alterazioni del mais. Contributo all'etiologia della pellagra . In: Rivista d'Igiene e Sanità Pubblica . Vol. 7, No. 21, 1896, pp. 484-487 and No. 22, pp. 869-888.
  • Research ultérieures sur la biologie et sur le chimisme des arsenio-moisissures. In: Archives Italiennes de Biologie . Vol. 35, No. 2, 1901, pp. 201-211.

literature

  • Ronald Bentley: Bartolomeo Gosio, 1863–1944: An appreciation . In: Advances in Applied Microbiology . tape 48 . Academic Press, Amsterdam, Boston January 1, 2001, pp. 229-250 , doi : 10.1016 / S0065-2164 (01) 48005-1 .

swell

  1. ^ Bentley: Bartolomeo Gosio ... , p. 234f.
  2. Stanley M. Aronson: Wallpaper poisoned early-Victorian children , December 19, 2005
  3. ^ Ronald Bentley, Thomas G. Chasteen: Arsenic Curiosa and Humanity . In: The Chemical Educator . tape 7 , no. 2 , April 2002, ISSN  1430-4171 , p. 51-60 , doi : 10.1007 / s00897020539a .
  4. Sylvia Fontana: The glue paint of the 19th century as a design tool in interiors in Switzerland . Bern 2004, OCLC 604582456 (diploma thesis).
  5. HW Florey, MA Jennings, K. Gilliver, AG Sanders: Mycophenolic Acid. An Antibiotic from Penicillium brevicompactum Dierckx. In: The Lancet . Vol. 247, No. 6385, 1946, pp. 46-49.
  6. ^ Bentley: Bartolomeo Gosio ... , pp. 236-238 for the entire section.