Hideyo Noguchi - Career

Career

In 1900 Noguchi moved to the United States, where he obtained a job as a research assistant with Dr. Simon Flexner at the University of Pennsylvania and later at the Rockefeller Institute of Medical Research. He thrived in this environment. At this time his work concerned poisonous snakes. In part, his move was motivated by difficulties in obtaining a medical position in Japan, as prospective employers were concerned about the impact the hand deformity would have on potential patients. In a research setting, this handicap became a non-issue. He and his peers learned from their work and from each other. In this period, a fellow research assistant in Flexner's lab was Frenchman Alexis Carrel, who would go on to win a Nobel Prize in 1912; and Noguchi's work would later attract the Prize committee's scrutiny. The Nobel Foundation archives have been only recently opened for public inspection; and what was once only speculation is now confirmed. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1913-1915, 1920, 1921 and 1924-1927.

While working at the Rockefeller Institute of Medical Research in 1913, he demonstrated the presence of Treponema pallidum (syphilitic spirochete) in the brain of a progressive paralysis patient, proving that the spirochete was the cause of the disease. Dr. Noguchi's name is remembered in the binomial attached to another spirochete, Leptospira noguchii.

In 1918, Noguchi traveled extensively in Central America and South America to do research for a vaccine for yellow fever, and to research Oroya fever, poliomyelitis and trachoma. He believed that yellow fever was caused by spirochaete bacteria instead of a virus, and spent much of the next ten years attempting to prove this theory. His work on yellow fever was widely criticized as taking an inaccurate approach which was contradicting contemporary research, and confusing yellow fever with other pathogens. In 1927-28 three different papers appeared in medical journals which discredited his theories. Happily, it turned out he had confused yellow fever with leptospirosis, and his "yellow fever" vaccine was successfully used to treat the latter disease.