Background
He was born Vladimir Aronovitch Chavkin in Odessa, Russia; his mother died when he was a young boy and he had a lonely childhood.
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He was born Vladimir Aronovitch Chavkin in Odessa, Russia; his mother died when he was a young boy and he had a lonely childhood.
At age twelve he was sent to high school in Berdyansk where he excelled in sports and natural sciences.
In 1879 he moved to the faculty of natural sciences of the University of Novorossik (now the University of Odessa) where he studied physics, mathematics, and zoology.
While at university Haffkine came under the influence of Elie Metchnikoff, the microbiologist and future Nobel Prize winner. At the same time, in an effort to combat open anti-Semitism he became active in the Jewish self-defense league. As a result, he ws arrested by the Russian authorities but was released following Metchnikoffs intervention.
Haffkine received his diploma in natural sciences in 1883, and although at the time there was great emigration from Russia to the United States, he chose to remain in Odessa with Metchnikoff.
While at the Institute, Haffkine began to study the protozoon, paramecium, and published a paper entitled “A Contribution to the Study of Immunity” (1890). He also turned his attention to studies of typhoid fever and cholera and the development of an inoculation serum against the cholera vibrio (which had been discovered by Robert Koch at the institute in 1883).
From 1883 to 1888 he worked on the staff of the Zoological Museum of Odessa and became involved in original research into the fundamental phenomena of organic life. He could have received a teaching position if he accepted baptism, but refused. However, it became apparent that he could not progress in Russia as a result of anti-Jewish government edicts. Metchnikoff emigrated to France to join the Pasteur Institute in Paris, while Haffkine moved to Switzerland, where he worked as an assistant in physiology at the medical school in Geneva for a year until he was able to become a laboratory assistant and librarian at the Pasteur Institute.
Promotion in 1892 enabled him to further his research into an attenuated cholera inoculation and that same year he injected himself with his preparation to prove it was harmless to humans.
In 1915, at the age of fifty-five, Haffkine retired. He settled in Paris, becoming deeply involved in Jewish religious and Zionist affairs and in the minority rights of Jews in eastern Europe.
Haffkine had been an observant Jew for most of his life and in 1929, shortly before his death, he created the Haffkine Foundation in Lausanne, setting aside much of his amassed wealth to foster Jewish education in eastern Europe.
Following Haffkine’s success, the former viceroy of India, Lord Dufferin and Ava, then British ambassador to France, persuaded him to make India the testing ground for his cholera inoculations rather than Siam (Thailand) as he had intended. Haffkine began his work in India in 1893. Despite initial tribal opposition, his success with those who agreed to be inoculated was so remarkable that, following an outbreak of plague in 1896, he was sent to Bombay by the government to develop a suitable vaccine. Within three months he developed the appropriate vaccine and his fame became worldwide. Queen Victoria honored him with the Order of the Indian Empire in 1897 and two years later he became a British subject.
Haffkine’s treatment of another outbreak of plague in 1902 was marred by nineteen deaths from tetanus contracted from a contaminated bottle of serum. Despite the thousands who benefited from his vaccine, his opponents used these deaths as an excuse to attack him and his methods. Haffkine was forced to leave India pending an official inquiry and was exonerated from all blame concerning the preparation of the contaminated serum only in 1907. He returned to India to continue his inoculation program and research and, whereas initially he had been opposed by the skeptical Indian tribesmen for using his revolutionary inoculations, now he was criticized for not producing enough.
