Karl Friedrich Meyer

Karl Friedrich Meyer ( born May 19, 1884 in Basel, † April 27, 1974 in San Francisco) was a native of Switzerland, American veterinarian, pathologist, epidemiologist and microbiologist, known for research on many infectious diseases.

Life

Karl Friedrich Meyer was the son of a cigar dealer in Basel and studied from 1902 at the University of Basel and 1903 /04 at the University of Zurich, especially biology, zoology and histology, where he was supported by the anatomy professor Heinrich Zangger. In 1905 he was at the University of Munich under Friedrich von Müller and later at the University of Bern, where he studied veterinary medicine and attended by Theodor Langhans pathology courses. In 1909 he received his doctorate at the University of Zurich in veterinary medicine, with a dissertation, which he made in Bern in Wilhelm Kolle. 1908 to 1910 he was in South Africa. At the laboratories of the Ministry of Agriculture of the Transvaal, where he worked as a pathologist under the Swiss veterinarian Arnold Theiler He also developed vaccines against rabies and lung disease in cattle, where he found a new species of pathogens ( mycoplasma ), and explored the East African coast fever, a cattle disease. On his return to Switzerland ( he cured his malarial disease from ) he took through the mediation of the U.S. Ambassador to Switzerland for a quote as Assistance Professor of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. There he soon became professor and explored the horse sickness and glanders, brucellosis. In 1914 he became Professor of Bacteriology and Protozoology at the University of California, Berkeley ( where he taught at the Faculty of Medicine medical bacteriology and a curriculum developed in Public Health ) and the University of California, San Francisco. He remained there for the rest of his career. Until 1948 he was Director of the Department of Bacteriology at Berkeley and San Francisco. In 1915 he began research at the George Williams Hooper Foundation Institute for Medical Research, where he succeeded George H. Whipple as director. For stays during a sabbatical year at the University of Zurich in 1924 he received his doctorate there in bacteriology. After his retirement in 1954 he was honorary director and had an honorary professorship at the Hooper Institute and remained scientifically active.

Theses

Meyer made ​​important contributions to the study of various infectious diseases in animals and humans. In addition to brucellosis he explored, among other things botulism from 1919, which was in the 1920s a big problem for the California food industry. One founded on the initiative of Meyer Institute was headed by him from 1926 to 1930 and there he developed quality assurance procedures for the can industry. In the 1930s he studied a form of encephalitis in horses caused by arboviruses and transmitted to horses and humans through mosquitoes. Meyer - who dealt with the disease since 1914 - was the transmission paths ( so that the fight against mosquitoes as the most effective countermeasure turned out), isolated the virus and developed a vaccine for horses. Meyer also studied intensively the plague and the environmental conditions under which epidemics occur. He developed a vaccine for the U.S. Army, which was used successfully in Vietnam. He explored the epidemiology of induced on the airborne fungal spores California Valley Fever ( coccidioidomycosis ), leptospirosis (in which he found that about half of the dogs were infested in San Francisco at that time that could transmit the pathogen via the drinking water to humans ), psittacosis ( where he isolated the pathogen that was one of the chlamydia ), which he curbed in California through nationwide tests and regulation of trade and quarantine for parrots, and fish and shellfish poisoning ( Paralytic shellfish Poisoning, PSP ), where he developed test method and seasonal closures in California initiated. According to the investigation of a case in which an infected cook on a church event on a spaghetti pie more than 100 people with typhoid fever ( and in previous years already infected other people ), he increasingly turned to public health issues. In particular, he promoted the idea of the latent infection, in which the carrier itself is not ill, but pass on the disease. He also conducted research on anthrax, yellow fever, the flu pandemic of 1918, hepatitis and malaria.

Meyer has published over 800 scientific papers and book chapters and was also active in public health issues actively. In the years 1940/1941 he was president of the American Association of Immunologists.

Rates and Memberships

He received the Albert Lasker Award in 1951 for Basic Medical Research and the 1960 Gairdner Foundation International Award, 1961 Jessie Stevenson Kovalenko Medal. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

He was married twice; in first marriage in 1913 with Mary Elizabeth Lindsay, with whom he had a daughter, her second husband since 1960 with Marion Grace Lewis. In 1922 he became an American citizen.