Félix Hubert d'Hérelle

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Félix Hubert d'Hérelle

Félix Hubert d'Hérelle (born April 25, 1873 in Paris , † February 22, 1949 in Paris, France ) was a Franco-Canadian biologist and leading microbiologist. Along with Frederick Twort, he is considered to be one of the discoverers of bacteriophages (viruses that multiply in bacteria), the so-called "bacteria eater". They owe their name and their discovery to d'Herelle. In 1919 he treated a dysentery patient with bacteriophage solutions for the first time . The patient was cured, and the eccentric d'Herelle pioneered bacteriophage therapy , which was soon used by other medical professionals .

Adolescence

D'Hérelle was born in Paris. He attended l'Ecole Monge ( Lycée Condorcet ) and then the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris. His father, who was 30 years older than his mother, died when Félix was six years old. At the age of sixteen he traveled around Western Europe by bike, after finishing school at the age of 17 he visited South America, then the rest of Europe and Turkey, where he met his future wife Marie Claire.

Career as a scientist

D'Hérelle was a self-taught academic . At the age of 24, now the father of a daughter, he and his family moved to Canada. There he set up a private laboratory and continued his education in microbiology with the help of books and his own experimental studies . He earned his living working for the Canadian government, for which he studied the fermentation and distillation of maple syrup into schnapps. He also worked as a doctor for a geological expedition, despite not having a medical degree and being medically inexperienced. Together with his brother, he invested almost all of his money in a chocolate factory that soon went bankrupt.

When his money was almost exhausted and his second daughter was born, he signed a contract with the Guatemala government , which hired him as a bacteriologist at the hospital in Guatemala City. He was also supposed to develop a process for extracting whiskey from bananas. The harsh and dangerous country life was exhausting for his family, but d'Hérelle, always an adventurer at heart, enjoyed working close to “real life” compared to the sterile climate of a “civilized” clinic. He later stated that his scientific path began with this work. In 1907 he accepted an offer from the Mexican government to continue his studies on fermentation. He and his family moved to a sisal plantation near Mérida ( Yucatán ), where he had successfully developed a method for the production of sisal schnapps after health problems in 1909.

Necessary machines for mass production were ordered in Paris, where he supervised the assembly of the machines and in his scant free time worked in a laboratory at the Pasteur Institute . He turned down the offer to run the new Mexican company, pointing out that it was too boring. He used the remaining time on the plantation to stop a locust plague by isolating a bacterium that is harmful to the locusts from their intestines, multiplying them and using them again against the locusts.

D'Hérelle moved with his family to Paris in the spring of 1911, where he again worked as an unpaid assistant in a laboratory at the Pasteur Institute. In the same year, he received scientific attention when the results of his successful attempt to counter the Mexican locust plague with Coccobacillus were published. When he visited Argentina at the end of the year, he was given the opportunity to review his new knowledge about grasshopper control on a much larger scale than before. So in 1912 and 1913 he also fought the Argentine locust plague with Coccobacillus . Although Argentina did not fully appreciate d'Hérelle's success, other countries invited him to present his method.

During the First World War, d'Hérelle and his assistants (including his wife and daughters) produced over twelve million doses of medication for the allied military. At this point in history, certain medical treatments were fairly straightforward compared to today's standards. The smallpox vaccine developed by Edward Jenner was one of the few vaccines available . A first remedy for bacterial infections was the arsenic arsphenamine , which was mainly used for syphilis ; it had severe side effects.

In 1915, the British bacteriologist Frederick W. Twort discovered a previously unknown agent that infected and killed bacteria, but did not pursue the question of the nature of this agent any further. Independently of this, on September 3, 1917, the discovery of an “invisible microbe that counteracts the dysentery” was announced by d'Hérelle. This was preceded by studies of soldiers suffering from dysentery, where he came across the phenomenon of disappearing bacterial cultures. He was able to trace this process back to tiny viruses that attack and destroy bacteria as parasites.

The isolation of phages by d'Hérelle was carried out as follows:

  1. A clear culture medium was inoculated with bacteria; after hours it becomes cloudy.
  2. The bacteria in the cloudy nutrient medium were infected with phages and died, with new phages being produced; the nutrient medium cleared up again.
  3. The culture medium was filtered through a porcelain filter, which retained bacteria and other larger objects; the tiny phages could pass through the filter.

In the spring of 1919, d'Hérelle isolated phages from chicken droppings and used them to successfully treat a form of chicken typhus. These successful experiments on animals encouraged d'Hérelle to try out similar treatment methods on humans. In August 1919, the first patient was cured with d'Hérelles bacteriophage therapy.

At that time, however, nobody knew anything about the existence of bacteriophages. The German microbiologist Philalethes Kuhn also developed a theory about the existence of bacterial parasites, which he called Pettenkoferien . He saw the results of d'Hérelle as a special case of these parasites. As it turned out later, his observations were based only on changes in the shape of the cultivated bacteria and not on the existence of a bacterial parasite.

Only after Ernst Ruska had constructed the transmission electron microscope in 1931, his brother Helmut Ruska was able to observe bacteriophages in 1939. D'Hérelle suspected that they reproduced by somehow "eating" the bacteria. Later this idea could be confirmed in principle. Others assumed that the cause of the bacterial lysis was rather lifeless agents, for example proteins that are already present in the bacteria and should only trigger the release of similar proteins that kill the bacteria. Because of this uncertainty and the carelessness with which d'Hérelle applied his phage therapy to humans, he was exposed to constant attacks from other scientists.

In 1920 d'Hérelle traveled to Indochina to study cholera and the plague , but returned at the end of the year. D'Hérelle, officially still an unpaid assistant, was finally banned from doing his laboratory work - as he later explained - because of a dispute with the deputy director of the Pasteur Institute, Albert Calmette. The biologist Édouard Pozerski (Édouard de Pomiane; 1875–1964) enabled d'Hérelle to continue his laboratory work. In 1921 d'Hérelle succeeded in publishing a book with his work as an official institute publication past Calmette. In the following year, phage therapy met with increased interest from doctors and scientists in Western Europe and was successfully used for various diseases. Since in rare cases bacteria became resistant to individual phage types, d'Hérelle suggested using “phage cocktails” with different phage strains for phage therapy.

After a brief period at the University of Leiden , d'Hérelle accepted a position at the Conseil Sanitaire, Maritime et Quarantenaire d'Egypte in Alexandria . This council was set up to prevent the plague and cholera from spreading across Europe. D'Hérelle successfully used bacteriophages in the treatment of people with plague, which he was able to isolate from plague-infected rats during his 1920 visit to Indochina. The British Empire also initiated a broad campaign against the plague on the basis of his research results. In 1927 d'Hérelle turned to new goals: Research into cholera in India .

He isolated bacteriophages from cholera victims. As usual, he did not choose a hospital with European hygiene standards, but worked in a tent to provide medical care for the population of a slum area. According to his theory, one had to leave sterile hospitals to study and combat bacterial infections where they originated. To do this, his working group dripped bacteriophage suspensions into the draw wells of the villages where cholera had broken out and reduced mortality from cholera from sixty to eight percent. Since he was offered a professorship at Yale University , he turned down an offer from the British government to continue working in India, so that his stay in India did not even last seven months.

D´Hérelle came to Tbilisi , Georgia at the invitation of Stalin in 1933 and founded the Eliava Institute for Phage Research with his friend Georgi Eliava in 1936 with financial support from the Soviet government . Since Eliava was arrested and executed in 1937 by his rival and KGB boss Lavrenti Beria after an obscure episode about a mutual lover, d'Hérelle left Georgia permanently. In 1948 the phage researcher received the Prix ​​Petit d'Ormoy . D'Hérelle died of pancreatic cancer in Paris on February 22, 1949. He was buried in Saint-Mards-en-Othe (Aube).

With the system confrontation between socialist and capitalist states came the almost complete division of the scientific world. After the triumphant advance of penicillin in the western industrial nations after 1945 and the use of further antibiotics, phages were increasingly forgotten as a natural therapeutic agent . Today phage therapy is gaining importance again in the course of increasing antibiotic resistance .

Honors

In 1925, the University of Leiden d'Hérelle awarded an honorary doctorate for the further development of phage therapy and the Leeuwenhoek medal , which is awarded only every ten years to the achievement of a scientist. The latter was particularly important to d'Hérelle, as his scientific role model Louis Pasteur had already received the medal in 1895. Although the phage researcher was nominated for the Nobel Prize several times , he never received it.

In 1933 he was elected a member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina . In 2007 he was posthumously inducted into the Canadian Medical Hall of Fame .

According to him that was Avenue Félix-D'Hérelle in the 16th arrondissement named in Paris.

literature

  • William C. Summers: Félix Hubert d'Herelle (1873-1949): History of a scientific mind. In: Bacteriophage. Vol. 6, No. 4 (2016), doi : 10.1080 / 21597081.2016.1270090 .
  • Thomas Häusler: Healthy through viruses. A way out of the antibiotic crisis . Piper Verlag, Munich; 2003.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ https://web.archive.org/web/20160108122200/http://www.pasteur.fr/infosci/archives/her0.html
  2. ↑ br-alpha ( memorial from November 26, 2010 in the Internet Archive )
  3. ↑ https://web.archive.org/web/20160108122200/http://www.pasteur.fr/infosci/archives/her0.html
  4. ↑ Oren Harman and Michael R. Dietrich: Outsider Scientists: Routes to Innovation in Biology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. page 60 ff.
  5. ↑ https://www.biospektrum.de/blatt/d_bs_pdf&_id=1539933
  6. ↑ https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2018/05/the-best-viral-news-youll-ever-read-antibiotic-resistance-phage-therapy-bacteriophage-virus/
  7. ↑ Member entry of Félix Hubert d'Herelle at the German Academy of Natural Scientists Leopoldina , accessed on November 26, 2015.
  8. ↑ Dr. Felix d'Herelle Canadian Medical Hall of Fame Laureate 2007 , video on the YouTube channel of the Canadian Medical Hall of Fame, January 5, 2011
personal data
SURNAME Hérelle, Felix Hubert d '
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Hérelle, Félix d '
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British-Canadian biologist
DATE OF BIRTH April 25, 1873
PLACE OF BIRTH Paris
DATE OF DEATH February 22, 1949
Place of death Paris , France