Waldemar Haffkine — sci (cholera vaccine) with roots in the Russian Empire
He was born in Odessa in March 1860 and studied natural sciences at the Imperial Novorossiya University there, working under Ilya Mechnikov - later a Nobel laureate and one of the founders of immunology - and taking his doctorate in 1884.
He had no future in the Russian Empire, for two connected reasons. He had joined a Jewish self-defence group, was injured during a pogrom, and was then briefly imprisoned for having been in it. And he was refused a university appointment because he would not convert to the Russian Orthodox Church. He left in 1888 for Geneva, taught physiology there for a year, and in 1889 followed Mechnikov to the newly founded Pasteur Institute in Paris - where he began as a librarian before working his way into practical bacteriology.
In 1892 he produced a vaccine against cholera. He tested it on himself first. Europe and Asia were in the middle of a cholera pandemic, and through the British ambassador in Paris he obtained permission to demonstrate the work in England and then to take it to India, arriving in March 1893.
What followed is generally credited as the first effective preventive vaccination against a bacterial disease in human beings. Over three years of field trials across Bengal, Oudh and the Punjab he inoculated tens of thousands of civilians and around ten thousand British and Indian troops, and where the vaccine was used, incidence and mortality fell sharply.
When bubonic plague reached Bombay in 1896 he was appointed bacteriologist to the Government of India, and within months had an antiplague vaccine, which he again tested on himself. Mass inoculation followed. He was made a Companion of the Order of the Indian Empire in 1897 and given the Cameron Prize in 1900, and Joseph Lister described him as a saviour of humanity.
Then came the Mulkowal disaster. In 1902, nineteen people in a Punjab village died of tetanus after receiving antiplague vaccine from a single contaminated bottle. A government commission in 1903 attributed the contamination to a change in sterilisation method at his Bombay laboratory - a heat process the Pasteur Institute had used safely for two years but which was new to the British Empire - and indicted him. He was relieved of his post and returned to England. The full findings, published in 1906, again found against him.
The evidence did not support it. The bacteriologist W. J. R. Simpson pointed out in the British Medical Journal that contamination in Bombay would have produced far heavier tetanus growth than was found, and that the assistant in the Punjab who opened the bottle had dropped the forceps on the ground after the prescribed sterilising procedure had been abandoned locally. Ronald Ross organised a letter to The Times signed by ten leading bacteriologists. Haffkine was exonerated in 1907, five years after the accusation. Some at the time called it a little Dreyfus affair. In India the stigma stayed with him.
He worked on in India until 1915, then returned to Europe, and died in Lausanne in 1930. In 1925 the Bombay government renamed his old laboratory at Parel the Haffkine Institute, which still carries the name.
"Left the Russian Empire in 1888 for Geneva, then Paris, then India"
Migration storyTracing the roots — Odessa
He left the Russian Empire in 1888 for Geneva and then the Pasteur Institute in Paris, holding Russian, French and British citizenship over his lifetime. The Haffkine Institute in Mumbai, his former laboratory at Parel, was named for him in 1925.
Born in Odessa in 1860 and educated at the Imperial Novorossiya University under Ilya Mechnikov. He was injured during a pogrom while serving in a Jewish self-defence group, briefly imprisoned for it, and denied a university post because he refused to convert to Russian Orthodoxy.
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Odessa. At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.