Koch

1.- In your opinion, why Koch didnt like to be a doctor?

I think that Koch didn't like to be a doctor because he didn't really know the
causes of the diseases of the people he treated. He felt that he wasn't
helping them because he didn't know how to make them feel better.
2.- According to Koch, which experiments have to be done to demonstrate
that one kind of microbe is the cause of a disease?
Koch demonstrated that one kind of microbe was the cause of a disease by
getting tissues that came from ill animals or people. Then Koch used dyes to
differentiate kinds of microbes. The samples were later examined using the
microscope. When the microbes were separated they were introduced in
animals, for example mice. Finally the animals were observed and Koch
could see if they were ill or not. If the animals were ill, that microbe was the
cause of the disease.
3.- What do you think about... men of science have either to be showmen
as were the magnificent and the passionate Pasteur- or they have to have
impresarios
I don't think that men of science have to be showmen or they have to have
impresarios. In my opinion, men of science have to do their job, which is
studying, investigating and teaching but without trying to entertain other
people.
4.- How did Koch manage to grow on species of microbes away from all
others.
Koch managed to grow one species of microbes away from all others by
putting them in a hanging-drop. This consisted of a very thin piece of glass
previously heated where a drop of fluid with microbes was placed and of a
concave piece of glass. Then the two glasses were turned upside down.
5.- Favourite paragraph
If old Leeuwenhoek, two hundred years before, had made so astounding a
discovery, Europe of the Seventeenth Century would have heard the news in
months. But in 1882 the news that Robert Koch had found the microbe of
tuberculosis trickled out of the little room of the Physiological Society the
same evening sang to Kamchatka and to San Francisco on the cable wires
that night, and exploded on the front pages of the newspapers in the
morning. Then the world went wild over Koch, doctors boarded ships and
hopped trains for Berlin to learn from him the secret of hunting microbes;
vast crowds of them rushed to Berlin to sit at Koch's feet to learn how to
make beef-broth jelly and how to stick syringes full of germs into the
wiggling carcasses of guinea-pigs.