Genomics Happens

摘要

Modern epidemiology is rooted in the work of John Snow, an English physician whose careful study of cholera victims led him to discover the wa-terborne nature of this disease. Cholera also played a part in the foundation of modern bacteriology—40 years after Snow's seminal discovery, Robert Koch developed the germ theory of disease following his identification of the comma-shaped bacterium Vibrio cholerae as the agent that causes cholera (see the figure). Koch's theory was not without its detractors, one of whom was so convinced that V. cholerae was not the cause of cholera that he drank a glass of it to prove that it was harmless. For unexplained reasons he remained symptom-free, but nevertheless incorrect.