Robert Koch was a German physician who is widely credited as one of the founders of bacteriology and microbiology. Robert Koch was born on 11th December 1843, in Hanover in Germany.
Koch came from a poor mining family and it took him a lot of determination to get a university place where he first studied mathematics and natural science, and then studied medicine. Koch attended the University of Gottingen, where he studied medicine, graduating in 1866. He then became a physician in various provincial towns.
Koch received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1905. He discovered the anthrax disease cycle in 1876. Koch found out that the anthrax microbe produced spores that lived for a long time, after an animal had died. He proved that these spores could then develop into the anthrax germs and could infect other animals.
He also developed ways of staining bacteria to improve the bacteria’s visibility under the microscope, and were able to identify the bacterial causes of tuberculosis in 1882, and cholera 1883.
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