A Quote by Robert Koch

The pure culture is the foundation for all research on infectious disease.

Robert Koch

Quote Topics

Culture Disease Foundation Infectious Pure Research

Quote Author

Robert Koch
German - Physician
December 11, 1843 - May 27, 1910

If diphtheria is a disease caused by a microorganism, it is essential that three postulates be fulfilled. The fulfilment of these postulates is necessary in order to demonstrate strictly the parasitic nature of a disease: 1) The organism must be shown to be constantly present in characteristic form and arrangement in the diseased tissue. 2) The organism which, from its behaviour appears to be responsible for the disease, must be isolated and grown in pure culture. 3) The pure culture must be shown to induce the disease experimentally. An early statement of Koch's postulates.

Friedrich Loeffler

This example illustrates the differences in the effects which may be produced by research in pure or applied science. A research on the lines of applied science would doubtless have led to improvement and development of the older methods - the research in pure science has given us an entirely new and much more powerful method. In fact, research in applied science leads to reforms, research in pure science leads to revolutions, and revolutions, whether political or industrial, are exceedingly profitable things if you are on the winning side.

Joseph John Thomson

Infectious disease exists at this intersection between real science, medicine, public health, social policy, and human conflict. There's a tendency of people to try and make a group out of those who have the disease. It makes people who don't have the disease feel safer.

Andrea Barrett

For the public ever to break command science it must first understand the basis of its enormous powers.......Traditionally, the power of medical sciences has been based on the fear of disease, particularly infectious disease.

Peter Duesberg

The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases is an institute of the National Institutes of Health that is responsible predominantly for basic and clinical research in the diagnosis, treatment and prevention of immunologic and infectious diseases.

Anthony Fauci

I think doctors have really come up to speed and understand that more women than men die of heart disease. [But] all the research on heart disease has really been based on men, and needs to be updated with research on women - even very early-stage research is done using male rats!

Laura Bush

Especially working in infectious disease, it's very interesting because these infectious diseases, these agents, they evolve over time. So it's very much an arms race and understanding how each changes to protect itself and to continue. And so it's very much this puzzle-solving but with this great urgency and importance in what you find.

Pardis Sabeti

In all, 86 per cent of the increased life expectancy was due to decreases in infectious diseases. And the bulk of the decline in infectious disease deaths occurred prior to the age of antibiotics. Less than 4 per cent of the total improvement in life expectancy since 1700s can be credited to twentieth-century advances in medical care.

Laurie Garrett

Whining is a virus, a lethal, infectious, epidemic disease.

Peter Høeg

With infectious disease, without vaccines, there's no safety in numbers.

Seth Berkley

We've gone from a preponderance of acute and infectious disease as a source of premature death to chronic diseases, which are the preponderance of the burden of illness in most of the world. That puts a much higher premium on the prevention of chronic disease than ever in history.

Harvey V. Fineberg

Infectious Disease is one of the few genuine adventures left in the world.

Hans Zinsser

That's the world out there, little green apples and infectious disease.

Don DeLillo

To prove that tuberculosis is caused by the invasion of bacilli, and that it is a parasitic disease primarily caused by the growth and multiplication of bacilli, it is necessary to isolate the bacilli from the body, to grow them in pure culture until they are freed from every disease product of the animal organism, and, by introducing isolated bacilli into animals, to reproduce the same morbid condition that is known to follow from inoculation with spontaneously developed tuberculous material.

Robert Koch

If anti-Semitism is a variety of racism, it is a most peculiar variety, with many unique characteristics. In my view as a historian, it is so peculiar that it deserves to be placed in a quite different category. I would call it an intellectual disease, a disease of the mind, extremely infectious and massively destructive.