Throughout the latter half of the 1800s, a fierce scientific rivalry was brewing. Dr. Emile Roux, alongside his peers, found himself caught up in a web of collaboration and competition as researchers worldwide scrambled to conquer deadly communicable diseases. The modernist era had already ushered in remarkable advances in science and medicine by the time Roux unveiled a diphtheria vaccine on November 1, 1894. For several years, he had been part of a Paris-based team dedicated to cracking the diphtheria puzzle. The origins of this quest stretched back to 1826, when French physician Pierre Bretonneau pinpointed the bacterium responsible for diphtheria — a discovery that essentially ignited a vaccine war between France and Germany.
The Race for a Vaccine
In an era when geopolitics and the absence of widespread long-distance travel kept nations largely isolated within their own borders, France and Germany each pursued their ambitions separately against the backdrop of European modernism. France had wielded superpower status for at least a century, while Germany's technological and research capabilities surged during the last half of the nineteenth century, positioning it as a rising superpower. Once Bretonneau had identified Corynebacterium diphtheriae — the bacterium behind diphtheria — scientists on both sides of the border launched into a heated race to develop a vaccine. So which of these late nineteenth-century superpowers would ultimately claim the first Nobel prize in medicine? That honor went to Germany's Emil von Behring.
Dr. Emile Roux's Breakthrough
When it came to getting vaccines into people's arms, France and Germany took strikingly different approaches. The French developed their diphtheria vaccine and immediately began administering it to sick patients at no cost. Germany, by contrast, treated the vaccine as marketable property, developing and manufacturing it with commercial intent — meaning that people suffering from a disease that disproportionately targets children more than any other demographic group would have to pay for treatment. Undeterred by German efforts, Roux and his team gathered data from 448 children who had received the vaccine. Roux understood that animal reactions to diphtheria in their blood generated vaccine antibodies, so his team injected horses possessing natural immunities and then derived the vaccine from horse blood. The results were striking: this new vaccine brought the mortality rate among these children down from 50% and above to 26%. When Roux accounted for various independent variables, the numbers were even more dramatic — they had actually reduced mortality to 7.5%.