Google Doodle celebrates Nobel Prize-winner Dr. Robert Koch

Google today celebrated the memory of German physician and microbiologist Robert Koch with a doodle. He won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1905.

Dr. Koch was awarded the Nobel for his "investigations and discoveries in relation to tuberculosis". He started his career by studying the anthrax bacillus, the bacteria that causes anthrax, and had, subsequently, played a pivotal role in developing the basic principles and techniques of modern bacteriology. He had also worked extensively on establishing the causative agent of cholera.

Born on December 11, 1843, Dr. Koch studied medicine at the University of Göttingen before working as a District Medical Officer at Wollstein. It was here that he started working on his various researchers. In the course of his career, he put forward a series of ‘Koch’s postulates’ that set out guidelines and principles linking microorganisms with specific diseases. These four-point guidelines are considered golden rules in medical microbiology.

Dr. Koch had initially used potato slices as the media to isolate pure bacterial cells to help with his research until his assistant, Julius Petri, invented the Petri dish, a small cylindrical dish used to culture bacterial cells. Today's Doodle represents these elements.

Dr. Koch passed away on May 27, 1910, at the age of 66. He has been immortalized by a large marble statue in Berlin-Mitte in a small park called Robert-Koch-Platz.