Medicine: Nobel Prize

The 1928 Nobel Prize for medicine was awarded last week to Dr. Charles Nicolle, director of the Pasteur Institute at Tunis! He got it for his work on infectious fevers. particularly those caused by micro-organ isms so minute that they filter through the pores of unglazed porcelain.

Typhus is one disease whose mode of transmission he discovered and whose way of prevention he invented. The germ breeds in the bodies of lice. One louse infects others. The community bite their human or animal host and into the bloody puncture slip the typhus organisms. Dr. Nicolle developed a vaccine from the blood of infected monkeys. Injected into humans it immunizes them. Its spreading use promises to wipe out typhus as a plague.

The Pasteur Institute of Tunis, which he has directed for 25 years,— was the second offshoot of Louis Pasteur’s original Institute in Paris. The first was at Saigon. The Tunis vintners knew of Pasteur’s work only that he was able to keep beer from spoiling and silkworms from dying. They demanded that the French Government, their overlord, send them men to prevent their wine turning sour. The French established the Tunis Pasteur Institute (1893), where the scientists quickly learned what spoiled Tunis wine. Then they turned, as Pasteur had turned, to discovering the causes, cures and preventions of human and animal diseases.†

— Previously he was an assistant professor at the Rouen School of Medicine.

†Last week Chicago unveiled a marble monument to Louis Pasteur. Guest was William T. Lane, 58, of Irvington, N. J. In 1885 he and three other children were infected with rabies. People raised money and sent them to Louis Pasteur in Paris. Pasteur cured them, the first Americans so saved. When they returned to the U. S. they all earned money by displaying themselves in a theatre.