Koch's Postulates — Then and Now

Koch ’ s Postulates — Then and Now

T his story begins in the early 1880s. The germ theory of disease was fairly well established, although some experts continued to challenge it. For example, Theodor Billroth (1829– 1894) of Vienna, often called the founding father of abdominal surgery, did not immediately accept the germ theory, but later embraced the concept and became very successful in many pioneering surgeries. Another crit...

Identification of Unknown Turfgrass Pathogens: Kochs Postulates

History In 1876, a country doctor in Germany by the name of Robert Koch developed the first conclusive empirical evidence that a particular microbe causes a particular disease. Although he was working on anthrax, a deadly disease of warm-blooded animals (caused by the bacterium Bacillus anthracis), the procedures he laid out for determining the pathogenicity of a microorganism (in other words, ...

Schizophrenia: Then and Now

EPS—Then and Now

"Slime" played a brief and spectacular role in the 19th century founded by the theory of primordial slime by Ernst Haeckel. However, that substance was never found and eventually abandoned. Further scientific attention slowly began in the 1930s referring to slime as a microbial product and then was inspired by "How bacteria stick" by Costerton et al. in 1978, and the matrix material was conside...

Then and Now