Lecture 4, 9/7, History's Microbiologist's

• 1676 - Van Leeuwenhoek (from Delft) learned to grind lenses better than everyone. Only had one lense. Our scopes have many more. He used his microscopes to look at cloth, this is how he learned to grind lenses. Some of his lenses magnified up to 230x.
• Called the microbes he saw his “animalcules”
• He made about 250 microscopes
• he looked at muscle fiber, myelin sheath. He had a lot of curiosity.
• Buried in the bottom of a church
• 1740’s to 1780’s - controversy of spontaneous generation. Needham was advocate of spontaneous generation.
• Was disproved with the meat in the jar experiment by Redi and Spallanzani
• 1796 - jenner
• milk maids were not likely to get small pox because they got cow pox (vaccinia is name of cow pox virus) first.
• this was the start of all the vaccinations in our world
• 1830’s-40’s controversy of fermentation
• two views
• non-vital view or non-biological view
• the thought was that fermentation was due to unstable chemical substances called ferments (also known as enzymes)
• Vitalist view or Biological view (Pastuer)
• Yeasts bud and accomplish fermentation by producing enzymes that break down the sugar into alcohol and CO2
• 1854 - Snow is the father of epidemiology
• England had vibrio cholerae going around and Snow figured out the cause.
• 1860’s - Lois Pasteur
• was a painter
• helped disprove spontaneous generation.
• He helped with wine and beer makers whose wines were going sour.
• you need pure yeast when you ferment things. you must also disallow air from entering. Fermentation is anaerobic. Yeast take glucose to pyruvate. The pyruvate is taken to ethynol and CO2. Acetobacter acetii – causes it to go to acidic acid. Essentially the wine and beer makers had been making vinegar.
• Pasteurization
• 62 degrees centigrade to kill the organisms – LTH: low temperature hold
• HTST – high temperature short time 72 degrees centigrade for 15 seconds.
• Silk worms were dying
• Pastuer determined that a protozoan was causing the problem
• Studied anthrax because it is a large organism.
• Attenuated vaccines
• Contains organisms that are alive but can’t cause the disease. Help your body develop antibodies
• Rabies – very deadly. You can get it from bats, raccoons, skunks. Not a big problem in US anymore.
• Streptococcus pneumoniae – one of the worst causes of primary pnemoniae.
• Staphylococcus aureus – causes staff infections. Causes about 25 diseases. One of the toughest is Abbreviated MRSA.
• Autoclave may have originated in his lab.
• He was one of the first to grow anaerobe’s
• 1870’s Koch
• German MD but pursued microbiology
• Superb experimentalist
• Worked with anthrax because it was large (he could see it well)
• Wanted to grow stuff easier and developed Agar, a solid medium to grow things. They couldn’t use gelatins because microorganisms break down protein.
• colonies are the manifestation of growth of one organism. This was important because this allowed them to isolate certain organisms and equate certain attributes with certain organisms.