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physician professor bacteriologist
Nicolle was born in 1866 in Rouen, France, his father, Eugène Nicolle, was a physician at the municipal hospital and professor of natural history at the École des Sciences et des Arts.
He also was in charge of a bacteriology laboratory, in which he inoculated monkeys with Ducrey’s bacillus and improved techniques for making antidiphtheria serum.
He learned about biology early from his father Eugène Nicolle, a doctor at a Rouen hospital.
Following family tradition, he studied medicine although he considered himself more gifted in literature than in science.
His older brother Maurice (1862 - 1932), who had become a noted bacteriologist and pathologist, persuaded him to enroll at the Pasteur Institute.
There, under the supervision of Émile Roux and drawing on the teaching of Metchnikoff, Nicolle wrote his doctoral dissertation(1893)on the pathology and etiology of the soft chancre, a venereal disease caused by Ducrey’s bacillus.
Nicolle remained director of the institute until his death.
In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech and in his lectures at the Collège de France he later described how the idea suddenly occurred to him that the factor that ceased to act at the hospital threshold could only be an ectoparasite-in this case, the louse.
An enthusiastic man with an unshakable faith in humanistic ideals, and stubborn whenever questions of principle were at stake, Nicolle often found himself in conflict with an inactive and meddlesome bureaucracy.
This initial hypothesis was confirmed by rigorous experiments, the results of which Nicolle reported to the Académie des Sciences in July 1909.
He first infected a chimpanzee by injecting it with blood taken from a man ill with typhus.
He demonstrated that the disease could be transmitted from this animal to other monkeys only by lice.
This discovery had an immense practical significance because of the prophylactic procedures that followoed from it.
The effectiveness of systematic delousing to combat rickettsiosis, which traditionally plagued armies, was dramatically demonstrated during World War I. Nicolle’s research was not confined to exanthematous typhus.
He also examined most of the germs causing infectious diseases in the Mediterranean region.
The extraordinary value of his work was due to the combination of imagination and a talent for careful observation.
He formulated bold hypotheses, which he scrupulously tested in the light of experimental data.
He divided his time among scientific research, writing, and his family. Nicolle described African infantile leishmaniasis and differentiated it from kala-azar, generally found in India.
In collaboration with L. Manceaux, he isolated a previousluy unknown parasite of Tunisian rodents.
Toxoplasma gondii (1908).
Nicolle elucidated the mechanisms by which lice spread the infection caused by Obermeir’s spirillum and determined the precise role of ticks in epidemics involving certain spirochetes, and of flies in the tranmission of trachoma.
In addition, he demonstrated the viral nature of influenza.
In 1931 he participated in studies of the murine typhus found in Mexico. Having discovered that injection with serum from a convalescing victim of exanthematous typhus can protect others who have been exposed to the disease, Nicolle sought to apply this finding to other diseases.
While retaining his post in Tunis, he lectured at the Collège de France every year from 1932 to 1935.
In 1933 he was made professor at the CollègeCollege de France.
His work was carried on principally in the fields of infectious diseases, particularly typhus exanthematous, Malta fever, spirochaetae, and spotted fever.
While in Algiers he discovered that the body louse is the carrier of typhus.
For Nicolle, the birth of an idea is comparable to biological mutation.
In 1916, during his tenure at the Pasteur Institute in Tunis, with Dr. Blaisot he discovered a cure for typhus exanthematous.
His work was of material value in eliminating the ravages of spotted fever from the armies in World War I.
Nicolle’s chief theoretical contribution was the elaboration and utilization of the concept of unaparent infection.
During his life Nicolle wrote a number of non-fiction and bacteriology books, including Le Destin des Maladies infectieuses; La Nature, conception et morale biologiques; Responsabilités de la Médecine, and La Destinée humaine.
He also introduced of a vaccination for Malta fever, discovered the transmission method of tick fever, studied cancer, scarlet fever, rinderpest, measles, influenza, tuberculosis and trachoma. He made an identification of the parasitic organism Toxoplasma gondii within the tissues of the gundi (Ctenodactylus gundi).
After obtaining his medical degree, Nicolle returned to Rouen, where he married Alice Avice; they had two children, Marcelle and Pierre, both of whom became well-known physicians. He married Alice Avice in 1895, and had two children, Marcelle (b. 1896) and Pierre (b. 1898).
