Paul Ehrlich's influence on modern microbiology and immunology Essay

Paul Ehrlich's influence on modern microbiology and immunology - Essay Example The latter had long been a serious disease not only in Europe but also all over the world and had developed into a serious public health problem that needed to be dealt with swiftly. Ehrlich’s contribution to microbiology in this case came from the study of the chemicals that were seen to have a discriminating affinity to certain types of organism or tissues. In addition, because of this research, he and a fellow scientist, SakahiroHata, ended up developing salvarsan, an arsenical that killed spirochaete without having any mortal effects on the patients on whom it was administered. Despite the fact that this arsenical had some toxic effects, it was still a great advancement in the field of applied organic chemistry, and it was for this reason, among others, that Ehrlich was honoured with the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1908. He was a pioneer in the conducting of experiments that involved the use of chemical drugs for the treatment of diseases and this was done through the stud y of the diverse cells and tissues in the human body. These ended up revealing the fundamental principles that lay behind the immune system of the human body and this helped a great deal on the establishment of the use of chemotherapy in medicine. In addition, his development of salvarsan ensured that syphilis would, for the first time in history, be cured and this discovery may be considered to be amongst the greatest discoveries in the modern world because it came to reveal the potential which the systematic research in drugs had for the development of cures for other diseases (Sepkowitz 291). The development of the field now known as haematology came about through the efforts of Ehrlich, who conducted studies of how blood cells reacted when dye was applied to them. This new field came to be concerned with the study of blood and those organs that formed it, and as such came to be and is still recognised as one of the most prominent scientific fields. In fact, many of the terms tha t Ehrlich coined when conducting his various researches have come into common use in medicine and these involve the term chemotherapy (Elliott 53). Ehrlich had many influences in his early life that inspired the development of his interest in science and scientific methods of research and among the most influential individuals in his early life was his cousin Karl Weigert. The latter was a well-known pathologist in his time and it was he who helped Ehrlich develop an interest in the study of cells through his teaching him how to dye cells so that he could have a better view of them under the microscope. From this time onward, Ehrlich became engrossed in his research on dye reactions on cells and this interest continued even after he joined university and it was his research that may for the most part, have led to the development of modern microbiology as well as immunology. Through his doctoral thesis it can be suggested that during such an early period of his suggests that even at this early stage in his vocation, he had already come to the conclusion that his chosen