Hideyo Noguchi

Hideyo Noguchi (born Nov. 24, 1876, Inawashiro, Japan—died May 21, 1928, Accra, Gold Coast colony [now Ghana]) was a Japanese bacteriologist who first discovered Treponema pallidum, the causative agent of syphilis, in the brains of persons suffering from paresis. He also proved that both Oroya fever and verruga peruana could be produced by Bartonella bacilliformis; they are now known to be different phases of Carrion’s disease, or bartonellosis.

Noguchi graduated in 1897 from a proprietary medical school in Tokyo and then went in 1900 to the University of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia, where he worked on snake venoms under Simon Flexner. In 1904 he went to the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, New York City, which sponsored his work for almost a quarter of a century. Noguchi devised means of cultivating microorganisms that had never before been grown in the test tube. He studied poliomyelitis and trachoma and worked on a vaccine and serum for yellow fever. He died of yellow fever, which he contracted during research on the disease in Africa.