Fred Neufeld and pneumococcal serotypes: foundations for the discovery of the transforming principle
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Cellular and Molecular Life Sciences
MEMORIES AND RETROSPECTIVES
Fred Neufeld and pneumococcal serotypes: foundations for the discovery of the transforming principle Klaus Eichmann · Richard M. Krause
Received: 7 February 2013 / Revised: 23 March 2013 / Accepted: 22 April 2013 / Published online: 21 May 2013 © Springer Basel 2013
Abstract During the first decade of the twentieth century, the German bacteriologist Fred Neufeld, later Director of the Robert Koch-Institute in Berlin, first described the differentiation of pneumococci into serotypes on the basis of type-specific antisera. This finding was essential for subsequent research at the Rockefeller Institute of Medical Research (RIMR) in New York, and elsewhere, aiming for the conquest of human pneumococcal pneumonia, including antiserum therapy, the discovery that the type-specific antigens were carbohydrates, and the development of effective multivalent pneumococcal polysaccharide vaccines. Moreover, on the basis of pneumococcal serotypes Fred Griffith, in 1928 in London, discovered pneumococcal transformation, and Oswald T. Avery and coworkers, in 1944 at RIMR, identified DNA as the transforming substance. This sequence of events, leading to today’s knowledge that genes consist of DNA, was initiated by a farsighted move of Simon Flexner, first Director of the RIMR, who asked Neufeld to send his pneumococcal typing strains, thus setting the stage for pneumococcal research at RIMR. Here, we describe Fred Neufeld’s contributions in this development, which have remained largely unknown.
K. Eichmann (*) Max Planck Institute of Immunobiology and Epigenetics, Stübeweg 51, 79108 Freiburg, Germany e-mail: [email protected] R. M. Krause National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, National Institutes of Health, 16 Center Drive, Bethesda, MD 20892, USA e-mail: [email protected]
Keywords History of infectious diseases · History of bacteriology · Bile solubility · Quellung reaction · Bacteriotropin
Introduction Ever since Emil von Behring and Shibasaburo Kitasato had reported in 1890 that infected animals can be cured by antiserum of animals immunized with the corresponding bacterial toxins [1, 2], attempts were made worldwide to combat infectious diseases with immune sera. Two physicians, the brothers Felix and Georg Klemperer, observed as early as 1891 that animals inoculated with the sputum of pneumonia patients became immune, and that patient sera could protect animals against subsequent infection with “Fraenkel’s diplococcus” [3]. Later dubbed streptococcus pneumoniae, or pneumococcus, these bacteria had first been described 1886 by Albert Fraenkel as a cause of human pneumonia [4]. The Klemperers’ observations stimulated a great number of physicians and microbiologists, to engage in studies to develop a serum therapy for human pneumonia, then a leading cause of death. One of them was Fred Neufeld, at the time employed at the Robert Koch Institute but commissioned to the Kaiserliche Gesundheitsamt (Imperial Health Service) in Berlin.
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