Noguchi, Hideyo

Noguchi, Hideyo (hēdā`yō nōg`chē), 1876–1928, Japanese bacteriologist, grad. Tokyo Medical College, 1897. He came to the United States c.1900 to work with Simon Flexner at the Univ. of Pennsylvania and in 1904 joined the Rockefeller Institute (now Rockefeller Univ.) staff. He made important studies of snake venoms, of smallpox and yellow-fever vaccines, and of the laboratory diagnosis of trachoma. He isolated (1913) the Treponema pallidum from a syphilis patient, proving that this spirochete was the cause of syphilis; he also developed a skin test for syphilis. He died of yellow fever in Accra, Ghana, where he had been studying that disease. His writings include Action of Snake Venom upon Cold-Blooded Animals (1904) and Laboratory Diagnosis of Syphilis (rev. ed. 1923).

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Noguchi, Hideyo (1876–1928) bacteriologist, immunologist; born in Inawashiro, Japan. From a poor family, he served as an apprentice to a surgeon and graduated from Tokyo Medical College (1897). He emigrated to the U.S.A. in 1899 and worked with Simon Flexner at the University of Pennsylvania, where his exhaustive research made him the authority on the action of snake venom. He went to the Rockefeller Institute (1904–28) where he made a number of crucial contributions to medical research: he developed the methods for growing pure cultures of spiral organisms such as the syphilis spirochete; he demonstrated the presence of the syphilis parasite, Treponema pallidum, in the cerebral cortex of deceased patients, identifying it as the cause of certain diseases; he contributed to the study of Rocky Mountain spotted fever, poliomyelitis, and trachoma. Regarded as the major microbiologist of his generation, he died prematurely from the African yellow fever he was studying.