Google Doodle celebrates Nobel Prize winner Dr Robert Koch

Google Doodle
celebrates Nobel Prize-winner Dr. Robert Koch

Google today celebrated the memory of German physician and
microbiologist Robert Koch with a doodle. He won the Nobel Prize in Physiology
or Medicine in 1905.

Dr. Koch was awarded the Nobel for his "investigations
and discoveries in relation to tuberculosis". He started his career by
studying the anthrax bacillus, the bacteria that causes anthrax, and had,
subsequently, played a pivotal role in developing the basic principles and
techniques of modern bacteriology. He had also worked extensively on
establishing the causative agent of cholera.

Also read: Koch to the rescue

Born on December 11, 1843, Dr. Koch studied medicine at the
University of Göttingen before working as a District Medical Officer at
Wollstein. It was here that he started working on his various researches. In
the course of his career, he put forward a series of ‘Koch’s postulates’ that
set out guidelines and principles linking microorganisms with specific
diseases. These four-point guidelines are considered golden rules in medical
microbiology.

Dr. Koch had initially used potato slices as the media to
isolate pure bacterial cells to help with his research until his assistant,
Julius Petri, invented the Petri dish, a small cylindrical dish used to culture
bacterial cells. Today's Doodle represents these elements.

Dr. Koch passed away on May 27, 1910 at the age of 66. He
has been immortalized by a large marble statue in Berlin-Mitte in a small park
called Robert-Koch-Platz.