Noguchi, Hideyo (November 24, 1876 - May 21, 1928; Japan)

Hideyo Noguchi was a Japanese bacteriologist who along with Simon Flexner was the first person in the United States to discover the bacteria which was the cause of syphilis - Treponema pallidum and thereby confirm the discovery made by Fritz Schaudinn.

Noguchi was born in Inawashiro, Japan. Noguchi attended and graduated from a proprietary medical school in Tokyo in 1897 and then went on to the position of research assistant to Simon Flexner at the University of Pennsylvania in 1900 where he worked on snake venom. In 1904, Noguchi followed Flexner and went to work at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in New York, which was under Flexner's direction. It was this institute that sponsored Noguchi's work for nearly the next quarter of a century.

During the course of his career, Noguchi able to devise a technique in which microorganisms that had never before been grown in a test tube could actually be cultivated. Today however, some doubts do exist as to whether or not Noguchi was actually able to cultivate the germs of some diseases such as poliomyelitis, rabies and trachoma. In his ongoing work on syphilis, Noguchi was able to modify the Wasserman test, the purpose of which was the detection of syphilis, as well as prove that general paresis and tabes dorsalis were indeed the late stages of syphilis. This discovery was made in 1913 while performing postmortem examinations on the brain and spinal cord. Noguchi also discovered that syphilis had delayed effects on the nervous system that may not become apparent until 10 to 20 years after the original infection had occurred.

In 1918, Noguchi turned his attention to the study of yellow fever in South America and he devoted his time to developing a serum and vaccine for the disease. Noguchi mistakenly stated that he discovered the spirochete that caused yellow fever. However, unbeknownst to him at the time, Noguchi had been misled by infectious jaundice. The years from 1925 to 1927, Noguchi worked on Oroya fever and verruga peruana which were prevalent afflictions in Peru and Ecuador. Noguchi was able to prove that the two conditions were manifested from the same bacterium species - Bartonella bacilliformis. In 1927, upon hearing that another bacteriologist, Adrian Stokes, had successfully transmitted yellow fever via a filtrable virus, Noguchi went to Africa to recheck his own findings. During the course of his research in Africa however, Noguchi was accidently infected with the yellow fever virus and later died in Ghana (Brittanica, 8:750, 1994; Encyclopedia Americana, 20:400, 1991; Encyclopedia International, 13:194, 1964 and Barba, p. 67, 1995).