science · 09 April 1915 · 109 years ago
death
Died 9 Apr 1915 at age 62 (born 24 Jun 1852).
German bacteriologist who discovered the organism that causes diphtheria, Corynebacterium diphtheriae, (1884) which had first been observed by the German physiologist Theodor Klebs in the throats of diphtheria patients (the organism became known as the Klebs-Löffler bacillus). The isolation and cultivation of pure cultures involved a number of formidable technical problems; Löffler found it necessary to develop a new medium, thickened serum, as the conventional gelatin used by Robert Koch required temperatures far too low for the diphtheria pathogen. In 1898, with Paul Frosch, he showed that viruses could cause diseases in animals by passing foot-and-mouth disease in cows by inoculation with cell-free filtrates taken from lesions.
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