Robert Koch Gold Medal

The Robert Koch Medal in Gold is awarded to a scientist who stands out in seminal research of infectious diseases and has accumulated a wealth of research experience like no other. More than once, the infection biologist Thomas F. Meyer was far ahead of time when it comes to setting landmarks in the research of infection biology, even reaching out towards discoveries on the origins of cancer.

Martin J. Blaser (USA)

Robert Koch Gold Medal 2019

Martin J. Blaser always says that the most important thing in life is to follow your inner voice, when young colleagues ask for some parting advice: “Follow your nose, and see where it leads!” Blaser’s life’s work is an impressive example of just how far this attitude can take you.

In 1998, he set up the “Foundation for Bacteria” in order to promote broader studies on the complex role of bacteria. Blaser and his team found the first indications that a colonization of the human stomach with H. pylori can protect against serious diseases of the esophagus, including esophageal cancer. And there were strong indications that it also helped prevent asthma among children.

In his much-quoted essay “What are the consequences of the disappearing human microbiota?”, which he published in 2009 together with the American microbiologist Stanley Falkow, he warned against a fatal “extinction” in the human microbiome that had led to a massive increase in diseases occurring in modern civilization, such as diabetes, asthma, obesity and food allergies. The experiments conducted in his lab showed that early life antibiotic exposures could play causal roles in obesity, juvenile diabetes, and inflammatory bowel disease through a perturbed microbiome. In his book “Missing Microbes: How the Overuse of Antibiotics Is Fueling Our Modern Plague”, Blaser made his work available to a broader readership, now translated into 20 languages.

Staffan Normark (Sweden)

Robert Koch Gold Medal 2018

When Staffan Normark looks back to the beginning of his career, he remembers a time when there was much that was simply “new and exciting”. Normark is one of the first researchers to clone a gene in Sweden. In 1980, aged just 35, he became the youngest professor at the university of his home town Umea. In 1983, he founded Symbicom, an early Swedish biotech company, which is now an affiliate of AstraZeneca. Normark had a sure sense for the incredible opportunities that opened up with the new molecular biology instruments. For a long time, he worked on the induction of “AmpC-beta-lactamase” in Escherichia coli and thus the creation of resistances to antibiotics. The beta-lactamases are bacterial enzymes that are able to split the “betalactam ring” of numerous antibiotics, thereby rendering it inactive. The enzymatic de-activation of antibiotics through beta-lactamases is regarded today as being the most common resistance mechanism.

Kyriacos Costa Nicolaou receives the Robert Koch Gold Medal for his life's work. He was born in Cyprus in 1946 and moved to the UK in 1964. He studied chemistry at the University of London and completed his bachelor's degree at Bedford College in 1969. In 1972 he obtained his PhD and then went first to Columbia University, and then to Harvard University, where he worked extensively on chemical methods for the synthesis of natural products. In 1976, Kyriacos Costa Nicolaou was appointed to a professorship at the University of Pennsylvania. There he developed methods for the synthesis of prostaglandins and macrolides. Particularly impressive were the syntheses of the endiandric acids, based on pericyclic cascade reactions. In 1989, Kyriacos Costa Nicolaou moved to a professorship at the University of California at San Diego, and established a research group at the Scripps Research Institute in San Diego.

He is credited with making the Scripps Research Institute one of the most important centers for synthetic chemistry and chemical biology in the world. Between 2005 and 2011, he also led a laboratory for chemical synthesis of natural products in Singapore at the ICES‐A*STAR Institute. In 2013, he moved to Rice University in Houston, Texas, where he continues to teach and conduct research today. Kyriacos Costa Nicolaou has developed chemical synthesis routes for hundreds of natural products, making them available for widespread use, especially in medicine, often gaining the first synthetic access to the target compound, exemplified by the anticancer drug paclitaxel and the antibiotic vancomycin.

Jörg Hacker was born in Grevesmühlen in Mecklenburg in 1952. After studying biology and obtaining his doctorate in Halle, still in the former GDR, he moved to the University of Würzburg in 1980. There he built up a large working group and a global network of scientific collaborations with great energy within a few years. After several calls to other universities, the University of Würzburg founded his own institute in 1993, the Institute for Molecular Infection Biology. Jörg Hacker played a key role in developing Würzburg into an internationally visible center for infection research. After almost 30 years in Würzburg, Hacker was appointed President of the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin in 2008. Just two years later, he was elected the first full-time President of the German National Academy Leopoldina, a post he held until 2020. Within just a few years, Hacker succeeded in transforming the Leopoldina from a scholarly community into a “working academy”, which today provides comprehensive advice to politics and society in almost all relevant fields of science.

Jörg Hacker's scientific work is dedicated to the pathogenicity of bacterial pathogens; he is one of the pioneers of molecular infection research. Since the 1980s, Jörg Hacker has been part of an illustrious small group of scientists who recognized very early on that molecular biology opened up completely new possibilities for researching bacterial pathogens. These pioneers included Stanley Falkow, Werner Goebel, Pascale Cossart, Philippe Sansonetti and Staffan Normark, to name just a few, with whom Jörg Hacker was and is friendly and collegial for decades, and who cooperated in a variety of constellations. Hacker recognized early on that the genes that give the bacterium Escherichia coli particular organ-specific pathogenicity are often organized in a modular manner, are clustered in the bacterial genome, and can be spread by horizontal gene transfer. Hacker coined the term "pathogenicity islands" for these modules. This concept - developed in the pre-genomic era - has proven to be extraordinarily viable, especially since the genome sequences of thousands of bacterial species and tens of thousands of bacterial strains have become available. To this day, the concept of the pathogenicity island is inextricably linked to the name Jörg Hacker.

Patrice Courvalin is awarded the Robert Koch Gold Medal. He is Emeritus Head of the Department of Antibacterial Agents and Professor at the Institut Pasteur in Paris. His life's work is a molecular understanding of a multitude of resistances to antibiotics in bacteria. He was able to show that and how bacteria can exchange resistance genes with each other and how resistance spreads very quickly, that bacteria can even take over resistance genes from antibiotic producers, which actually protect themselves, and that they can also pass on resistance genes to other organisms. These findings were and are of great practical importance for the development and use of antibiotics in practice. The laudatory speech was held by Nobel Prize winner Professor Emmanuelle Charpentier.