Hideyo Noguchi

Noguchi Hideyo (Japanese野 口 英 世, born November 9, 1876 in Inawashiro, Fukushima Prefecture, † May 21, 1928 in Accra, Ghana ) was a Japanese microbiologist and physician.

Life

Noguchi was born into a poor peasant family. At the age of one and a half years, he crashed into the fireplace and burned his left hand, which was henceforth crippled. The operative treatment of a burn took him as a child in touch with the world of medicine. Since he was no longer suitable because of her disability for the hard work on the land, his mother Shika endeavored to his training as a doctor. From 1893 he studied medicine at the Nihon Ika Daigaku and was approved at the age of 20 years as a doctor. In 1900 he accepted an invitation from Simon Flexner and began research on snake venoms at the University of Pennsylvania. From 1904 he worked at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, where he announced in August 1911 it was the pure cultivation of spirochetes, the causative agent of syphilis succeeded. This pure cultivation could not be reproduced but by other researchers. Groundbreaking was the demonstration of spirochetes in the brain tissue of patients suffering from progressive paralysis patient, who succeeded him in 1913. The evidence of pathogens of polio and rabies published by him later proved to be wrong. It was created in 1914 and 1915 proposed for the Nobel Prize in Medicine.

On his return to Japan in September 1915, he was received by the public with loud cheers, came under his Japanese colleagues but cool rejection. In 1918 he traveled on behalf of the Rockefeller Foundation to Ecuador to conduct research on a vaccine against yellow fever. A few days after his arrival there he believed the causative agent of yellow fever to have discovered. In the spirochetes described by Noguchi, but it was possibly due to the excitation of Weil's disease.

After Noguchi had proven treatment method proven in 1927 in Ecuador in West Africa as a failure, he decided in 1928 in Accra (Ghana) to establish a laboratory for the study of yellow fever. In the research with rhesus monkeys infected Noguchi himself with the yellow fever virus and died of this tropical disease. A portrait Noguchi found on the new 1000 - yen note, the Bank of Japan issues since end of 2004.

In 2006, the Japanese government donated the Hideyo Noguchi Africa Prize for outstanding achievements in the field of medicine and infectious diseases.