Albert Calmette (redirected from Léon Charles Albert Calmette)

Calmette, Albert 

Born July 12, 1863, in Nice; died Oct. 29, 1933, in Paris. French microbiologist and hygienist. Member of the French Academy of Medicine (1919) and the Academy of Sciences in Paris (1927).

Calmette graduated from the University of Paris medical department in 1885. He was a student of L. Pasteur. From 1895 to 1919 he was director of the Pasteur Institute and simultaneously (1898-1917) professor of hygiene and bacteriology of the medical department at Lille; in 1917 he became vice-director of the Pasteur Institute in Paris. His principal works dealt with tuberculosis, smallpox, plague, the biological purification of sewage, microbiological and serological techniques, and the development of serotherapeutic methods of treating snakebites; he also proposed a diagnostic reaction to test for tuberculosis. Together with the French scientist C. Guérin he created an antituberculosis vaccine, known throughout the world as BCG, which was first used on newborns in 1921. From 1893 to 1897 he studied the epidemiology of plague in Saigon. Together with the French microbiologist A. Yersin, he was the first to apply the techniques of serotherapy.

WORKS

Predokhranite’naia vaktsinatsiia protiv tuberkuleza pripomoshchi BCG.
Moscow-Leningrad, 1929. (Translated from French.) Rukovodstvo po mikrobiologicheskoi i serologicheskoi tekhnike, 2nd ed. Moscow-Leningrad, 1937. (Translated from French.)

REFERENCES

Liubarskii, V. A. “Kal’mett.” Zhurnal mikrobiologii i immunobiologii, 1934, vol. 12, issue 1, pp. 1-6.
Togunova, A. I. “Zhizn’ i deiatel’nost’ A. Kal’metta.” Vestnik Akademii meditsinskikh nauk SSSR, 1964, no. 8.

R. S. RABINOVICH