Waldemar Haffkine

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Waldemar Mordechai Haffkine
Odessa University, University of Geneva, Pasteur Institute, Haffkine Institute
Author abbrev. (botany)Khawkine

Waldemar Mordechai Wolff Haffkine

CIE, born Vladimir Aronovich (Markus-Volf) Khavkin (Russian: Владимир Аронович (Маркус-Вольф) Хавкин; 15 March 1860 – 26 October 1930) was a Russian-French bacteriologist known for his pioneering work in vaccines
.

Haffkine was educated at the

Imperial Novorossiya University and later emigrated first to Switzerland, then to France, working at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, where he developed a cholera vaccine that he tried out successfully in India. He is recognized as the first microbiologist who developed and used vaccines against cholera and bubonic plague. He tested the vaccines on himself. Joseph Lister, named him "a saviour of humanity".[1][2]

He was appointed

Mohammedans and is decorated by the descendant of William the Conqueror and Alfred the Great."[3] He naturalised as a British Subject in 1900.[4]

In his final years Haffkine

Orthodox Jewish causes and a supporter of Zionism
.

Early years

Born into a Jewish family in Odessa, Kherson Governorate, Russian Empire, the fourth of five children of Aaron and Rosalie (daughter of David-Aïsic Landsberg) in a family of a Jewish schoolmaster. Received his education at the gymnasium of

Berdyansk, Odessa,[5][6] and St. Petersburg.[7][8]

Young Haffkine was also a member of the Jewish League for Self-Defense in Odessa. Haffkine was injured while defending a Jewish home during a

Ilya Mechnikov.[9]

Haffkine continued his studies from 1879 to 1883 with Mechnikov at

Odessa University, but after the assassination of Tsar Alexander II, the government increasingly cracked down on people it considered suspicious, including intelligentsia.[7] Haffkine graduated with a Doctor of Science at the age of 23.[5] Haffkine was also employed by the zoological museum at Odessa from 1882 to 1888. Debarred from professorship, as a Jew,[7] in 1888, Haffkine was allowed to emigrate to Switzerland and began his work at the University of Geneva, as an assistant professor of Physiology.[5] In 1889 he joined Mechnikov and Louis Pasteur in Paris at the newly established Pasteur Institute where he took up the only available post of librarian.[8][10]

Protozoological studies

Haffkine began his scientific career as a

parasite of Paramecium.[11] In the early 1890s, Haffkine shifted his attention to studies in practical bacteriology.[11]

The

Cyrillic
as "Mardochée-Woldemar Khawkine".

Anti-cholera vaccine

Haffkine during anti-cholera vaccination in Calcutta, March 1894
Haffkine's report on the anti-cholera vaccination campaign, 1895

At the time, one of the five great cholera pandemics of the 19th century ravaged Asia and Europe. Even though Robert Koch discovered Vibrio cholerae in 1883, the medical science at that time did not consider it a sole cause of the disease. This view was supported by experiments by several biologists, notably Jaume Ferran i Clua in Spain.[citation needed]

Haffkine focused his research on developing a cholera vaccine, and produced an attenuated form of the

bacterium. Risking his own life, on 18 July 1892, Haffkine performed the first human test on himself and reported his findings on 30 July to the Biological Society. Even though his discovery caused an enthusiastic stir in the press, it was not widely accepted by his senior colleagues, including both Mechnikov and Pasteur, nor by European official medical establishment in France, Germany and Russia.[citation needed
]

Haffkine considered India, where hundreds of thousands died from ongoing epidemics, as the best place to test his vaccine.[10] Through the influence of the Marquis of Dufferin and Ava, who was in Paris as the British Ambassador, he was allowed to demonstrate his ideas in England. He proceeded to India in 1893 and established a laboratory at Byculla in 1896, which moved to Parel and was later called the Haffkine Institute. Haffkine worked on the plague and by 1902–03 half a million were inoculated but on 30 October 1902, 19 people died from tetanus out of 107 inoculated at Mulkowal. This "Mulkowal disaster" led to an enquiry.[12] He was briefly suspended but reappointed director of the Biological Laboratory in Calcutta.[citation needed] He retired in 1915 and suffering from malaria, had to return to France.

Anti-plague vaccine

"Unlike tetanus or diphtheria, which were quickly neutralized by effective vaccines by the 1920s, the immunological aspects of bubonic plague proved to be much more daunting."

nervous breakdown; two others quit), a form for human trials was ready and on 10 January 1897[14] Haffkine tested it on himself. "Haffkine's vaccine used a small amount of the bacteria to produce an immune reaction."[15] After these results were announced to the authorities, volunteers at the Byculla jail were inoculated and survived the epidemics, while seven inmates of the control group died. "Like others of these early vaccines, the Haffkine formulation had nasty side effects, and did not provide complete protection, though it was said to have reduced risk by up to 50 percent."[13][15]

Despite Haffkine's successes, some officials still primarily insisted on methods based on sanitarianism: washing homes by fire hose with lime, herding affected and suspected persons into camps and hospitals, and restricting travel.[citation needed]

Even though official Russia was still unsympathetic to his research, [

V. K. Vysokovich and D. K. Zabolotny, visited him in Bombay. During the 1898 cholera outbreak in the Russian Empire, the vaccine called "лимфа Хавкина" ("limfa Havkina", Havkin's lymph
) saved thousands of lives across the empire.

By the turn of the 20th century, the number of inoculees in India alone reached four million and Haffkine was appointed the Director of the Plague Laboratory in Bombay (now called Haffkine Institute).[10] In 1900, he was awarded the Cameron Prize for Therapeutics of the University of Edinburgh.[16]

Haffkine was the first to prepare a vaccine for human prophylaxis by killing virulent culture by heat at 60 °C.[17] The major limit of his vaccine was the lack of activity against pulmonary forms of plague.[18]

Connection with Zionism

In 1898, Haffkine approached Aga Khan III with an offer for Sultan Abdul Hamid II to resettle Jews in Palestine, then a province of the Ottoman Empire: the effort "could be progressively undertaken in the Holy Land", "the land would be obtained by purchase from the Sultan's subjects", "the capital was to be provided by wealthier members of the Jewish community", but the plan was rejected.[citation needed]

Little Dreyfus affair

In March 1902, nineteen Indian villagers from Mulkowal in Punjab (inoculated from a single bottle of vaccine) died of tetanus, whilst the other 88 villagers were well. Evidence pointed to the contamination of one bottle - 53N. The procedure for sterilisation at the Parel lab had been changed from carbolic acid to sterilisation using heating, a process that had been used at the Pasteur Institute safely for two years but was new in the British Empire. The 1903 commission from the Indian government concluded this was the source of the contamination.[1]

An inquiry commission indicted Haffkine, and he was relieved of his position and returned to England. The report was unofficially known as the "Little Dreyfus affair", as a reminder of Haffkine's Jewish background and religion. [citation needed]

The

the claim and overruled the verdict: it was discovered that an assistant used a dirty bottle cap without sterilizing
it.

In July 1907, a letter published in The Times called the case against Haffkine "distinctly disproven". It was signed by Ronald Ross, William R. Smith, and Simon Flexner, among other medical dignitaries. This led to Haffkine's acquittal.

Late years

Haffkine on a 1964 stamp of India

Since Haffkine's post in

Lausanne, Switzerland
, where he spent the last years of his life.

Haffkine received numerous honors and awards. In 1925, the Plague Laboratory in Bombay was renamed the Haffkine Institute. In commemoration of the centennial of his birth, Haffkine Park was planted in Israel in the 1960s.

Orthodox Judaism

In a biography of him, Nobelist

Selman Abraham Waksman explains that, in this last phase of his life, Haffkine had become a deeply religious man. Haffkine returned to Orthodox Jewish practice and wrote A Plea for Orthodoxy
(1916). In this article, he advocated traditional religious observance and decried the lack of such observance among "enlightened" Jews, and stressed the importance of community life, stating:

A brotherhood built up of racial ties, long tradition, common suffering, faith and hope, is a union ready-made, differing from artificial unions in that the bonds existing between the members contain an added promise of duration and utility. Such a union takes many centuries to form and is a power for good, the neglect or disuse of which is as much an injury to humanity as the removal of an important limb is to the individual... no law of nature operates with more fatality and precision than the law according to which those communities survive in the strife for existence that conform the nearest to the Jewish teachings on the relation of man to his Creator; on the ordering of time for work and rest; on the formation of families and the duties of husband and wife, parents and children; on the paramount obligations of truthfulness and justice between neighbor and neighbor and to the stranger within the gates.

— Haffkine (1916)[20]

In 1929, he established the Haffkine Foundation to foster Jewish education in Eastern Europe. Haffkine was also respectful of other religions, and "he considered it of the utmost importance to promote the study of the Bible."[21]

In 1982, the

Hasidic movement published three letters addressed to Haffkine by the sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, who had engaged Haffkine to support the Jews living in communist Russia.[22]
: 32–47 

References

  1. ^ a b Gunter, Joel; Pandey, Vikas (11 December 2020). "Waldemar Haffkine: The vaccine pioneer the world forgot". BBC News. Retrieved 14 December 2020.
  2. ^ JHALA, H. I. "W. M. W. Haffkine, Bacteriologist—A Great Savior of Mankind" (PDF). Indian Journal of History of Science.
  3. ^ London Jewish Chronicle. 1 June 2012. p. 8
  4. ISBN 978-1-4711-6991-5
    .
  5. ^
    S2CID 220029389
    .
  6. ^ Igor Lyman, Victoria Konstantinova. The Ukrainian South as Viewed by Consuls of the British Empire (Nineteenth – Early Twentieth Centuries) Volume 1: British Consuls in the Port City of Berdyansk (Kyiv, 2018), pp. 117–18, 316–17
  7. ^
    S2CID 42075270
    .
  8. ^
    doi:10.1002/path.1700340202
    .
  9. S2CID 42075270
    .
  10. ^ a b c Rats, fleas and men; Anthony Daniels on how the secret of bubonic plague was found. by Anthony Daniels. Sunday Telegraph (London). p. 14. 25 August 2002.
  11. ^
    ISBN 9783540926771
    . pp. 164–65
  12. S2CID 4032542
    .
  13. ^
    ISSN 1045-6007
    . 22 September 2002.
  14. ^ Haffkine Institute- For Training, Research and Testing haffkineinstitute.org, accessed 11 December 2020
  15. ^
    ISSN 0899-8280
    . 1 July 2004.
  16. PMID 89932
    .
  17. ^ Practical bacteriology, microbiology and serum therapy (medical and veterinary) on Open Library at the Internet Archive, p. 468
  18. ^ Haffkine's plague vaccine on Open Library at the Internet Archive
  19. ^ Douillet, Claudine. "Livre juif: Waldemar Mordekhai Haffkine Biographie intellectuelle | LeMonde.co.il". Retrieved 13 December 2016.
  20. ^ A Plea for Orthodoxy; reprinted from The Menorah Journal Méhul, Etienne Nicolas. Joseph and his brethren: opera in three acts ([19?]). London: Breitkopf & Härtel, p. 13
  21. Waksman, Selman Abraham
    . 1964. The brilliant and tragic life of W.M.W. Haffkine, bacteriologist. Rutgers University Press. pp. 75, 77
  22. ^ Schneersohn, Y.Y. (1982) IGROIS KOIDESH (Vol. II). Brooklyn: Kehot Publication Society.

Sources

Notes

  1. ^ Marian Schwartz
  2. ^ Mahatma Haffkine

External links

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