Howard Taylor Ricketts

Howard Taylor Ricketts ( born February 9, 1871 in Findlay, Ohio; † May 3, 1910 in Mexico City, Mexico) was an American pathologist.

He studied medicine at Northwestern University in Evanston and then. Microbiology in Germany in Berlin and at the Pasteur Institute In 1902 he was serving as an associate professor of pathology at the University of Chicago.

When he was on vacation in Montana in 1906, he heard of the outbreak of typhoid fever in the Rocky Mountains, a deadly disease that was limited to a small area in the west. Then he examined this infectious disease that is transmitted from animals as transport hosts to humans, and could prove in 1908 the pathogen in the blood of infected people and the active and Vector Viehzeckenart. It is non-motile rods or spherical bacteria. Your metabolism does not work on its own, therefore they require host cells for survival and can therefore be described as parasites ( Rickettsia rickettsii )

In 1910, he traveled to Mexico City, where a typhus epidemic prevailed. He suspected typhoid fever is triggered by the same mechanism as typhus. Before his death, he was able to demonstrate that monkeys that were infected with typhoid fever, after her recovery had an immunity to this disease. This finding was the basis for further research and for vaccines.

He was infected with typhus and died in Mexico from the disease.

Facilities located between bacteria and viruses rickettsia are named after him. The University of Chicago forgives him annually in honor of the Howard Taylor Ricketts Award, the respective winners lecturing. At the University of Chicago existed from 1914 until the 1980s, Ricketts Laboratory, Howard T. Ricketts Regional since 2009 biocontainment Laboratory, a biosafety level 3 laboratory.