Alexandre Émile John Yersin (22 September 1863 – 1 March 1943) was a Swiss-French physician and bacteriologist. He is remembered for his work as a pioneer in microbiology and immunology. Yersin is the co-discoverer of both the Diphtheria and Tetanus toxins (1890 with Émile Roux) and of the bacillus responsible for the bubonic plague or pest (1894, with Kitasato Shibasaburō). The bacteria was later named in his honour: Yersinia pestis. Yersin also demonstrated for the first time that the same bacillus was present in the rodent as well as in the human disease, thus underlining the possible means of transmission.
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Alexandre Yersin in the context of Yersinia pestis
Yersinia pestis (Y. pestis; formerly Pasteurella pestis) is a gram-negative, non-motile, coccobacillus bacterium without spores. It is related to pathogens Yersinia enterocolitica, and Yersinia pseudotuberculosis, from which it evolved. Yersinia pestis is responsible for the disease plague, which caused the Plague of Justinian and the Black Death, one of the deadliest pandemics in recorded history. Plague takes three main forms: pneumonic, septicemic, and bubonic. Y. pestis is a facultative anaerobic parasitic bacterium that can infect humans primarily via its host the Oriental rat flea (Xenopsylla cheopis), but also through aerosols and airborne droplets for its pneumonic form. As a parasite of its host, the rat flea, which is also a parasite of rats, Y. pestis is a hyperparasite.
Y. pestis was discovered in 1894 by Alexandre Yersin, a Swiss/French physician and bacteriologist from the Pasteur Institute, during an epidemic of the plague in Hong Kong. Yersin was a member of the Pasteur school of thought. Kitasato Shibasaburō, a Japanese bacteriologist who practised Koch's methodology, was also engaged at the time in finding the causative agent of the plague. However, Yersin actually linked plague with a bacillus, initially named Pasteurella pestis; it was renamed Yersinia pestis in 1944.
Alexandre Yersin in the context of Kitasato Shibasaburō
Baron Kitasato Shibasaburō (北里 柴三郎; January 29 [O.S. 17 January], 1853 – June 13, 1931) was a Japanese physician and bacteriologist. He is remembered as the co-discoverer of the infectious agent of bubonic plague in Hong Kong during an outbreak in 1894, almost simultaneously with Alexandre Yersin.
Kitasato was nominated for the first annual Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1901. Kitasato and Emil von Behring, working together in Berlin in 1890, announced the discovery of diphtheria antitoxin serum. Von Behring was awarded the 1901 Nobel Prize because of this work, but Kitasato was not.