1854: Emil von Behring, who will develop a vaccination to eradicate diphtheria, is born in Hansdorf, East Prussia.

Von Behring was on his way to the priesthood when a friend of the family, an army doctor, convinced the elder von Behring to send his son to the Army Medical Academy in Berlin. Already hard-working and methodical, the boy thrived in the disciplined atmosphere.

Upon graduation, he served as a German army doctor before returning to research, where he became an assistant to renowned physician Robert Koch. He joined Koch at the Institute for Infectious Diseases, and between 1889 and 1894 devoted most of his time to working on a cure for diphtheria, a scourge at the time.

After a number of failures, von Behring, working with Japanese colleague Shibasaburo Kitasato, found that by treating diphtheria-infected guinea pigs with iodine trichloride, some of the animals built up a resistance to the disease. He also found that treating an infected animal with serum taken from a successfully treated animal often resulted in a cure.

The antiserum that came out of this research would eventually rein in diphtheria, although it still appears in congested, poverty-stricken populations where sanitation is poor.

For his achievement, von Behring was awarded the first Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, in 1901.

Source: McGraw-Hill Higher Education

This article first appeared on Wired.com March 15, 2007.