Kitasato, Shibasaburo (1853–1931)

Kitasato was a famous Japanese physician and bacteriologist (Fig. 1), who entered in 1885 the laboratory of Robert Koch at Berlin (Germany). There he studied with Emil von Behring and Paul Ehrlich the agents of tetanus (Clostridium tetani) and diphtheria (Corynebacterium diphtheriae), which were important “killers” of the human population at this time (e.g., diphtheria was called “death angel of children”). Together with Emil von Behring (who got in 1901 the first Nobel Prize for Medicine or Physiology), he succeeded in 1890 to prove that antitoxins against these bacteria (obtained from horses) can be used as vaccines against diphtheria and against tetanus. In 1892 he returned to Japan; from there he started expeditions to Hong Kong (where he detected in 1894 at the same time as Alexandre Yersin the agents of plague, today called Yersinia pestis) or to the Manchuria in order to fight against the plague epidemics. In 1897 he detected together with his Japanese colleague Kiyoshi Shiga...