Robert Koch Quotes

If my efforts have led to greater success than usual, this is due, I believe, to the fact that during my wanderings in the field of medicine, I have strayed onto paths where the gold was still lying by the wayside. It takes a little luck to be able to distinguish gold from dross, but that is all.

The day will come when man will have to fight noise as inexorably as cholera and the plague

Rudolf Virchow, Alt-48'er Steinewerfer und Pathologe, Schliemannbegleiter und Politiker, aber auch Robert Koch, der Erfinder von Cholera und Tuberkelose – die beiden muss man einfach persönlich kennen, wenn’s um die Charité geht.

I am afraid that those comments go back to the late 80's. At that time I was a skeptic — the argument based on Koch's postulates to try to distinguish between cause and association. … Today I would regard the success of the many antiviral agents which lower the virus titers (to be expected) and also resolve the failure of the immune system (only expected if the virus is the cause of the failure) as a reasonable proof of the causation argument.

Charles Koch’s mentor, the quasi-anarchist Robert LeFevre, had taught the Kochs that “government is a disease masquerading as its own cure.” Their extreme opposition to the expansions of the federal government that had taken place during the Progressive Era, the New Deal era, the Great Society, and Obama’s presidency had helped to convince voters that Washington was corrupt and broken and that, when it came to governing, knowing nothing was preferable to expertise. Charles Koch had referred to himself as a “radical,” and in Trump he got the radical solution he had helped to spawn. —

According to one recent study [...] the [climate change] denial-espousing think tanks and other advocacy groups making up what sociologist Robert Brulle calls the “climate change counter-movement” are collectively pulling in more than $ 900 million per year for their work on a variety of right-wing causes, most of it in the form of “dark money”— funds from conservative foundations that cannot be fully traced. This points to the limits of theories like cultural cognition that focus exclusively on individual psychology. The deniers are doing more than protecting their personal worldviews - they are protecting powerful political and economic interests that have gained tremendously from the way Heartland and others have clouded the climate debate. The ties between the deniers and those interests are well known and well documented. Heartland has received more than $ 1 million from ExxonMobil together with foundations linked to the Koch brothers and the late conservative funder Richard Mellon Scaife. Just how much money the think tank receives from companies, foundations, and individuals linked to the fossil fuel industry remains unclear because Heartland does not publish the names of its donors, claiming the information would distract from the “merits of our positions.” Indeed, leaked internal documents revealed that one of Heartland’s largest donors is anonymous - a shadowy individual who has given more than $ 8.6 million specifically to support the think tank’s attacks on climate science. Meanwhile, scientists who present at Heartland climate conferences are almost all so steeped in fossil fuel dollars that you can practically smell the fumes. To cite just two examples, the Cato Institute’s Patrick Michaels, who gave the 2011 conference keynote, once told CNN that 40 percent of his consulting company’s income comes from oil companies (Cato itself has received funding from ExxonMobil and Koch family foundations). A Greenpeace investigation into another conference speaker, astrophysicist Willie Soon, found that between 2002 and 2010, 100 percent of his new research grants had come from fossil fuel interests.

Theobald Smith, yet another of those forgotten heroes of medical history. Smith, born in 1859, was the son of German immigrants (the family name was Schmitt) in upstate New York and grew up speaking German, so was able to follow and appreciate the experiments of Robert Koch more quickly than most of his American contemporaries. He taught himself Koch’s methods for culturing bacteria and was thus able to isolate salmonella in 1885, long before any other American could do so. Daniel Salmon was head of the Bureau of Animal Husbandry at the U.S. Department of Agriculture and was primarily an administrator, but the convention of the day was to list the bureau head as lead author on the department’s papers, and that was the name that got attached to the microbe. Smith was also robbed of credit for the discovery of the infectious protozoa Babesia, which is wrongly named for a Romanian bacteriologist, Victor Babeş. In a long and distinguished career, Smith also did important work on yellow fever, diphtheria, African sleeping sickness, and fecal contamination of drinking water, and showed that tuberculosis in humans and in livestock was caused by different microorganisms, proving Koch wrong on two vital points. Koch also believed that TB could not jump from animals to humans, and Smith showed that that was wrong, too. It was thanks to this discovery that pasteurization of milk became a standard practice. Smith was, in short, the most important American bacteriologist during what was the golden age of bacteriology and yet is almost completely forgotten now.

The illiberal left does not share this commitment. Their burgeoning philosophy in favor of government power to curtail freedom of thought, speech, and conscience is troubling. Environmentalist Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—a graduate of one of the nation’s most elite law schools, the University of Virginia—said in a September 2014 interview of those who deny climate change, “I wish that there were a law you could punish them under.”36 Accusing the libertarian Koch brothers of “treason” for disagreeing with his view of climate change, he said they should be “at the Hague with all the other war criminals.” He asked rhetorically, “Do I think the Koch brothers should be tried for reckless endangerment? Absolutely, that is a criminal offense and they ought to be serving time for it.” Kennedy’s penchant for arguing for state action against those who do not share his view of climate change is not new. In 2007, he said in a speech at Live Earth that politicians who are “corporate toadies for companies like Exxon and Southern Company” had committed treason and needed to be treated as traitors.37 In 2009, he deemed certain coal companies “criminal enterprises” and declared that one company’s CEO “should be in jail . . . for all of eternity.”38

Pasteur equally as mischief-makers. As late as 1883, Michel Peter, a Parisian physician held in high esteem by his colleagues, went so far as to denounce Pasteur’s work to his face, at an address at the National Academy of Medicine. “What do I care about your microbes? . . . I have said, and I repeat, that all this research on microbes are not worth the time spent on them or the fuss made about them, and that after all the work nothing would be changed in medicine, there would only be a few extra microbes. Medicine . . . is threatened by the invasion of incompetent, and rash persons given to dreaming.” But as the discoveries mounted, these holdouts were increasingly marginalized.

Nitesky No one knows what it's like You and me, you and I Underneath the night sky You and me, you and I I get lost all the time In my thoughts, in my mind You come through like a light In the dark, give me sight If you let my soul out You let my soul out You let my soul out It will come right back to you If you let my soul out You let my soul out You let my soul out It will come right back to you I will come right back to you Come right back Come right back to you No one sees what it's like You and me, you and I Never go, never hide You and me, you and I If you let my soul out You let my soul out You let my soul out It will come right back to you If you let my soul out You let my soul out You let my soul out It will come right back to you If you let my soul out You let my soul out You let my soul out It will come right back to you If you...

Some forty other Tea Party and antitax groups also clamored for all-out war. Among the most vociferous was the Club for Growth, a small, single-minded, Wall Street–founded group powerful for one reason: it had the cash to mount primary challenges against Republicans who didn’t hew to its uncompromising line. The club had developed the use of fratricide as a tactic to keep officeholders in line after becoming frustrated that many candidates it backed became more moderate in office. It discovered that all it had to do was threaten a primary challenge, and “they start wetting their pants,” one founder joked. Its top funders included many in the Koch network, including the billionaire hedge fund managers Robert Mercer and Paul Singer and the private equity tycoon John Childs.

tactics” books include Guy Kawasaki’s The Art of Start, Richard Koch’s The All-Day Energy Diet and The 80/20 Principle, and Robert Kiyosaki’s Rich Dad Poor Dad.

There are two eras in the modern history of tuberculosis—before and after Robert Koch’s 1882 discovery of Mycobacterium tuberculosis, which successfully established the germ theory of disease and demonstrated that tuberculosis is contagious.

That proof required the further development of microscopy, and the work of Robert Koch.

Robert Koch, a pioneering figure of the modern germ theory of disease (Chapter 12). In 1882 he identified Mycobacterium tuberculosis, and he established rigorous proof—in compliance with his own famous postulates—of its causative role in the disease.

Robert Koch pronounced that plague always retreats before the advance of civilization. The second claim was that, even in the Orient, scientific understanding of the disease would enable colonial authorities to exterminate it—if only the uneducated natives would cooperate.

Thus the approaches of both Pasteur and Lister on one hand and of Robert Koch and his followers on the other converged in establishing the methodologies of the modern operating room.

Mycobacterium tuberculosis was discovered by Robert Koch in 1882, and for that reason it is also known as “Koch’s bacillus” or the “tubercle bacillus.” Humans contract it through four disparate and highly unequal modes of transmission. Of these, three are relatively infrequent and have played only an auxiliary role in the modern epidemic: (1) transplacental transmission from mother to fetus, (2) inoculation of bacteria through an abrasion or shared needles, and (3) ingestion of bacilli through infected milk or meat. The fourth mode of transmission stands apart as overwhelmingly important—the inhalation of M. tuberculosis in contaminated airborne droplets expelled by sufferers as they cough, sneeze, or talk.

Mycobacterium tuberculosis was discovered by Robert Koch in 1882, and for that reason it is also known as “Koch’s bacillus” or the “tubercle bacillus.

THE DSM-V: A VERITABLE SMORGASBORD OF “DIAGNOSES” When DSM-V was published in May 2013 it included some three hundred disorders in its 945 pages. It offers a veritable smorgasbord of possible labels for the problems associated with severe early-life trauma, including some new ones such as Disruptive Mood Regulation Disorder,26 Non-suicidal Self Injury, Intermittent Explosive Disorder, Dysregulated Social Engagement Disorder, and Disruptive Impulse Control Disorder.27 Before the late nineteenth century doctors classified illnesses according to their surface manifestations, like fevers and pustules, which was not unreasonable, given that they had little else to go on.28 This changed when scientists like Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch discovered that many diseases were caused by bacteria that were invisible to the naked eye. Medicine then was transformed by its attempts to discover ways to get rid of those organisms rather than just treating the boils and the fevers that they caused. With DSM-V psychiatry firmly regressed to early-nineteenth-century medical practice. Despite the fact that we know the origin of many of the problems it identifies, its “diagnoses” describe surface phenomena that completely ignore the underlying causes. Even before DSM-V was released, the American Journal of Psychiatry published the results of validity tests of various new diagnoses, which indicated that the DSM largely lacks what in the world of science is known as “reliability”—the ability to produce consistent, replicable results. In other words, it lacks scientific validity. Oddly, the lack of reliability and validity did not keep the DSM-V from meeting its deadline for publication, despite the near-universal consensus that it represented no improvement over the previous diagnostic system.29 Could the fact that the APA had earned $100 million on the DSM-IV and is slated to take in a similar amount with the DSM-V (because all mental health practitioners, many lawyers, and other professionals will be obliged to purchase the latest edition) be the reason we have this new diagnostic system?

that a given bacterial species caused a specific disease. In 1876, Koch established a set of criteria that a bacterium must meet in test animals to be identified as the cause of disease. The criteria to become known as Koch’s postulates laid the foundation for diagnosis of infectious disease that continues today. Medical historians have debated whether the criteria attributed to Robert

Star businesses needn’t be anything to do with technology. Only one of my five stars is a technology venture. The longest-running star business is surely the Coca-Cola Company, incorporated in 1888 and a consistent star business until the 1990s. For over a century, despite two world wars, the stock market crash of 1929 and the ensuing Great Depression, Coca-Cola remained a star. The global market for cola increased on trend by more than 10 per cent every year and Coke remained the dominant player in that market. The value of the company increased with remarkable consistency, even bucking the trend and rising from 1929 to 1945.The company used World War Two to its immense advantage. After Pearl Harbor, Coke boss Robert Woodruff pledged to ‘see that every man in uniform gets a bottle of Coca-Cola for five cents, wherever he is and whatever it costs our company’. The US administration exempted Coca-Cola that was sold to the military from all sugar rationing. The US Army gave Coke employees installing plants behind the front lines the pseudo-military status of ‘technical observers’. These ‘Coca-Cola Colonels’ were exempt from the draft but actually wore Army uniforms and carried military rank according to their company salaries. General Eisenhower, a self-confessed Coke addict, cabled urgently from North Africa on 29 June, 1943: ‘On early convoy request shipment three million bottled Coca-Cola (filled) and complete equipment for bottling, washing, capping same quantity twice monthly . . .’2 Coke became familiar throughout Europe during the war and continued its remarkably cosy arrangement with the US military in Germany and Japan during the postwar occupation. From the 1950s, Coke rode the wave of internationalisation. Roberto Goizueta, the CEO from 1980 to 1997, created more wealth for shareholders than any other CEO in history. He became the first CEO who was not a founder to become a billionaire. The business now rates a value of $104 billion.

This was one instance in which the medical profession totally rejected something that they were not ready to accept because, in part, there was no framework for understanding the new concept. It was only later, when the causative agents were clearly identified through the work of Robert Koch, Louis Pasteur, and Joseph Lister, that it became accepted that germs cause disease. Koch discovered that a microscopic agent was the cause of tuberculosis and showed this with total certainty, leading to a revolution in medicine. All of a sudden, science and technology seemed to hold tremendous power, once it was understood that so many diseases were caused by infectious agents, and powerful new technologies could be developed to treat them with great specificity. This naturally gave rise to a “find it and fix it” culture. Over the last one hundred years, medical science has given rise to many wonderful things. However, it is now very heavily focused on disease. We spend almost no time on health. We make an assumption that for every disease, there is a defect that we need to find and fix. We don’t deal with people throughout their lives, but only when they’re sick. In the United States, we have become accustomed to assuming that one’s health is managed by one’s doctor, and that individuals have little responsibility or control over their health. Where does this leave us? On the one hand, life expectancy in 1900 was forty years. Today it’s eighty years. We have doubled life expectancy in a hundred years. That’s almost miraculous. On the other hand, in 1900 the most likely cause of death for a young man between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five would have been infection. Today, it’s murder, suicide, drug abuse, or violent accidents. We have made tremendous progress, but some of the consequences of our progress are absolutely terrifying. In addition, we have a tremendous accumulation of chronic diseases, many of which are fostered by people’s own behavior. One of the problems with Western medicine is that it tends to make a reductionist assumption that for every disease, there is a single causative factor that we need to find and fix. We now are learning that there are often multiple factors, rather than a single reductionist cause of disease. People are born with a baseline risk, and then environmental factors impinge on that risk over time. There is a tremendous difference in susceptibility to different diseases, yet we often have a lot of control over environmental factors that contribute to disease progression.

During a rabies scare in 1885, Pasteur concocted a treatment and gave the untested drug to a nine-year-old boy, Joseph Meister, who had been bitten by a grocer’s dog. Three weeks later, Meister had almost fully recovered. Pasteur’s legend received considerable help by the fact that Meister hailed from Alsace, a region controlled by Germany but claimed by France. The tricolor declared a victory for French science and for Pasteur who had beaten the German, Robert Koch, who had like Pasteur been working on vaccines. As a grown man, Joseph Meister took a job as a guard at the Institut Pasteur after Pasteur’s death. When German troops entered Paris in 1940, they swarmed the institute’s grounds and ordered that Pasteur’s crypt be opened. Meister likely had been one of several men who defended the crypt against the Wehrmacht and prevented its defilement. Shortly after, Meister inexplicably shot himself through the head. Even this act became part of Pasteur’s celebrity.

Finally, expert witnesses, academics, and inhabitants of think tanks would be required to disclose any and all sources of outside funding for testimony, books, papers, or studies that are put in the public domain. That way, if an “expert” funded by Koch Industries asserts that humans have no part in climate change, for example, or a professor funded by the National Retail Federation finds that raising the minimum wage leads to less employment, the public would have a means of evaluating the neutrality of such claims.

Robert Bruelle, a sociologist who studied funding for work that denied climate change, found that a sizeable chunk of this money—some $78 million between 2003 and 2010—was moved anonymously through DonorsTrust and Donors Capital Fund. The amount of money going through these groups, Bruelle found, increased dramatically after ExxonMobil and Koch Industries pulled back from publicly backing policy work that questioned whether climate change was real. But he couldn’t say whether it was these donors who fueled the surge of DonorsTrust with secret donations, since the group doesn’t have to reveal who’s using its services. Its donor-advised funds are like numbered Swiss bank accounts. “We just have this great big unknown out there about where all the money is coming from,” Bruelle said. Dark money moving through DonorsTrust has also fueled the Project on Fair Representation, the group seeking to dismantle the Voting Rights Act. And DonorsTrust has been the conduit for anonymous funding for groups sounding the alarm about Islamic threats within the United States. Some $18 million went to Clarion, a group that has been described as a leading purveyor of Islamophobia in the United States.