Robert Koch

A German physician and microbiologist regarded, alongside Louis Pasteur, as one of the founders of modern bacteriology. Koch identified the bacterium that causes anthrax in 1876, announced his discovery of the tuberculosis bacillus in Berlin on 24 March 1882, and identified Vibrio cholerae in 1884, work that won him the 1905 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. He formulated a set of criteria, since called Koch's postulates, for establishing that a specific microorganism causes a specific disease. In 1891 he became director of what was then Berlin's Institute for Infectious Diseases, later renamed the Robert Koch Institute in his memory.