biography
pronunciation:
[nogoochee]
| sex:
| male
|
| lived:
| (1876–1928)
|
| biography:
| Bacteriologist and immunologist, born in Inawashiro, Japan. From a poor family, he served as an apprentice to a surgeon and graduated from Tokyo Medical College (1897). He emigrated to the USA (1899) and worked with Simon Flexner at the University of Pennsylvania, where his exhaustive research made him the authority on the action of snake venom. He went to the Rockefeller Institute (1904–28), where he made a number of crucial contributions to medical research: he developed the methods for growing pure cultures of spiral organisms such as the syphilis spirochete; he demonstrated the presence of the syphilis parasite, Treponema pallidum, in the cerebral cortex of deceased patients, identifying it as the cause of certain diseases; and he contributed to the study of Rocky Mountain spotted fever, poliomyelitis, and trachoma. Regarded as the major microbiologist of his generation, he died prematurely from the African yellow fever he was studying. |
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