Nikolay Fyodorovich Gamaleya was a Russian physician and microbiologist who was one of the initiators of disinfection in Russian Empire and Soviet Union. He was the director of the Bacteriological-Physiological Institute in Odessa.
Background
Nikolay Gamaleya was born on February 17, 1859, in Odessa, then part of the Russian Empire (now Odessa, Ukraine). His father, Fyodor Mikhailovich Gamaleya, was a soldier; his mother, Karolina Vikentievna Gamaleya, was of Polish extraction.
Education
Having graduated from a gymnasium in 1876, Gamaleya enrolled in the Physics and Mathematics Faculty of Novorossysky University (now Odesa Mechnikov National University). While a student there he became fascinated with biology. After graduation from the university in 1881, Gamaleya enrolled in the Military Medical Academy at St. Petersburg (now Kirov Military Medical Academy), then the center of medical education in Russia. He graduated in 1883 with the title of a physician. In 1893 he defended his doctoral dissertation The Etiology of Cholera From the Point of View of Experimental Pathology.
Career
After graduation, Gamaleya returned to Odessa and began working at the Mochutkovsky hospital. The young doctor became actively interested in bacteriology, a science then in its infancy, and conducted research in a bacteriological laboratory that he had set up in his apartment.
Pasteur’s successful inoculation against rabies in 1885 definitively determined Gamaleya’s scientific interests. In 1886 the Odessa Society of Physicians commissioned him to familiarize himself at Pasteur’s laboratory with the technique of performing antirabies inoculations. His persistence and curiosity, medical knowledge, and microbiological training enabled him to master the method. The acquaintance with Pasteur was the beginning of a creative collaboration and of a personal friendship that was strengthened by the struggle with opponents of Pasteur’s method. At the time of especially sharp criticism of his method in England, Pasteur asked Gamaleya to defend it. Gamaleya was the first to inoculate himself with the antirabies vaccine, thereby proving its harmlessness to a healthy organism.
In 1886 the world’s second bacteriological station - there was already one in Paris - was established in Odessa, with the participation of Mechnikov and Gamaleya. Here antirabies inoculations were successfully administered according to Pasteur’s method, which undoubtedly was its best propaganda and defense. An ardent supporter of this method, Gamaleya used it widely and introduced important additions to its theoretical basis and valuable practical refinements.
In the 1880s, Gamaleya studied questions relating to the preparation of a vaccine against Siberian plague. In 1887 he discovered a vibrio similar to that of cholera in the intestines of sick birds, which he named the Mechnikov bacillus. The study of this bacillus marked the beginning of many years of research in cholera.
In 1899 Gamaleya published the textbook Foundations of General Bacteriology. Its fruitful generalizations and original views on fundamental questions in bacteriology had great significance for the development of the new science. The hypothesis of a viral origin for cancer was first stated in this book, and in 1910 Mechnikov supported this hypothesis.
Until 1910 Gamaleya worked in Odessa at the Bacteriological-Physiological Institute, which he had founded, lectured on general bacteriology at the stomatology school, and published many works.
In 1902, in connection with a plague epidemic that had broken out in Odessa, Gamaleya began a theoretical investigation of its epidemiology. The system of practical measures he developed had a decisive significance in the liquidation and prevention of this dreaded disease.
In the period preceding the 1917 Revolution, Gamaleya actively concerned himself with prevention of epidemics. In 1908-1909 he conducted investigations of typhus. Gamaleya confirmed the hypothesis that typhus was carried by lice by epidemiological investigations. Studying methods for the annihilation of lice, he found that the only effective method was dry heat treatment of the infected insects since their behavior is determined not by chemotaxis, as had been supposed, but solely by thermotaxis. He was the initiator of a program of fumigation in Russia. From 1912 through 1928 he studied smallpox, which was endemic in Russia. As director of the Smallpox Inoculation Institute, he developed a new, refined means for obtaining smallpox detritus.
Gamaleya’s proposals regarding the fight against cholera were exceptionally valuable in pre-Revolutionary Russia, where the low level of sanitation led to wide propagation of epidemic diseases. Gamaleya proposed that cholera vaccinations be administered as prophylaxis. The success of this arrangement led to the complete elimination in the 1920s of cholera in the Soviet Union.
Study of inflammation and the processes for destroying microbes led Gamaleya to the discovery in 1898 of certain bacteriolytic substances that destroy microbes. These previously unknown agents turned out to be bacteriophages, whose presence in nature was confirmed by d’Hérelle.
After 1917 Gamaleya successfully worked on problems of immunology, virology, and tuberculosis. Questions of sanitation, hygiene, and prophylactic medicine continued to remain the center of his attention. He was the scientific director of the Central Institute of Microbiology and Epidemiology from 1930 to 1938, which now bears his name. From 1938 Gamaleya headed the department of microbiology at the Second Moscow Institute of Medicine. He served as the organizer and permanent chairman of the All-Union Society of Microbiologists, Epidemiologists, and Infectionists.
Politics
Gamaley joined the All-Union Communist Party in 1948, citing a promise he gave to Lenin.
Views
Gamaley believed that microbes invading a living organism are subjected to the action of two closely related factors - humoral and cellular, that is, the action of soluble antibodies produced by the cells of the reticuloendothelial system. Extensive and careful experiments in the preparation of vaccines and microscopic study of their action on anthrax bacilli in all organism enabled Gamaleya to establish the important regularity of the relationship between fever in the vaccinated organism and the manufacture of antibodies. Gamaley also described the phenomenon of the so-called heteromorphism of bacteria and put forward the position of the existence of hidden forms of infection. He adhered to the viral theory of cancer for the rest of his life.
Membership
Gamaleya was a member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR and the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences.