Wilhelm Kolle

KOLLE, Wilhelm (born 1868), a well-known German bacteriologist and biochemist. He worked at Robert Koch's institute in Berlin. In 1897–99, Kolle headed a scientific expedition to South Africa to study human leprosy and rinderpest; in 1900, he studied tropical infectious diseases in the Sudan. In 1906, Kolle was appointed to the chair of hygiene and bacteriology at the University of Bern, where he also directed the Institute of Infectious Diseases and the Swiss Serological Institute. Since 1917, Kolle has served as director of the State Institute for Experimental Therapy and the Georg Speyer House Institute for Chemotherapeutic Research in Frankfurt am Main. Some of Kolle's earliest works, in collaboration with Pfeiffer, relate to the immunology of cholera. They provided the modern method for preparing bacterial vaccines. In 1896, Kolle, together with Pfeiffer, first described the phenomenon of bacterial agglutination. Together with R. Otto and Hetsch, Kolle studied the immunology of plague, and together with Wassermann, the morphology of meningococci and the complement-fixation reaction in meningococcal diseases. During the war, Kolle studied gas gangrene and prepared a serum against it with prophylactic and therapeutic properties. Kolle produced a number of studies in the field of biochemistry, having investigated the properties of antimony trioxide (Sb₂O₃) and its use in the treatment of trypanosomiases. He studied a series of salvarsan preparations and proposed the principle for their standardization. Kolle pointed out that neither mercury nor bismuth are directly bactericidal substances for spirochetes, but rather modify the properties of spirochetes, preparing them for destruction by the organism. Kolle and his school studied immunity in experimental syphilis and advanced the theory of "mono-immunity," valid only against a single homologous strain of spirochetes. He established the fact that latent syphilis can occur in animals (rabbits and mice) without symptoms, but with the possibility of superinfection. The number of Kolle's scientific works concerning the most diverse fields of bacteriology and immunology is enormous. A number of collective major publications, in which Kolle participates as an editor and author, are widely known. Such is the classical textbook written jointly with Hetsch (H. Hetsch), Experimentelle Bakteriologie u. die Infektionskrankheiten (Berlin-Vienna, 1st ed., 1906; 7th ed., 1929; translated into many languages, including 2 Russian editions, St. Petersburg, 1908 and 1912). The Handbuch der pathogenen Mikroorganismen, founded by Kolle together with A. Wassermann and currently published in its 3rd edition in 10 volumes under the editorship of W. Kolle, R. Kraus, and P. Uhlenhuth (Jena-Berlin-Vienna, 1927), is an exhaustive encyclopedia on all basic issues of bacteriology and related branches.