Shibasaburo Kitasato

Shibasaburo Kitasato (1853-1931) was a Japanese physician and bacteriologist who, while working in Robert Koch's laboratory in Berlin, collaborated with Emil von Behring in 1890 to demonstrate that immunity to tetanus and diphtheria could be transferred through blood serum containing antitoxins, establishing the principle of serum therapy that became a major tool against infectious disease. In 1901 von Behring alone was awarded the first Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for this work, an omission of Kitasato from the prize that has been widely discussed by later historians of medicine given the collaborative nature of the discovery. In 1894 Kitasato traveled to Hong Kong during a plague outbreak and identified the bacterium responsible for bubonic plague at nearly the same time as the French-Swiss bacteriologist Alexandre Yersin, working independently in the same city, a near simultaneous discovery whose priority and attribution has also long been debated. He returned to Japan to found and direct what became a leading Japanese institute for infectious disease research.