The Germ Hypothesis Part 2

Written by Mike Stone on June 12, 2024. Posted in Current News

In the first part of this investigation into the germ hypothesis, we established what exactly a hypothesis is supposed to be in regard to natural science, which is a proposed explanation for an observed natural phenomenon

We briefly touched on what led to Louis Pasteur (pictured) conjuring up his explanation of disease through germs with his plagiarized work on fermentation that he lifted from Antoine Bechamp.

We also examined the experimental evidence that he produced for both chicken cholera and rabies in order to see if his germ hypothesis was ever scientifically proven and validated.

What became clear upon investigating was that Pasteur’s experiments did not reflect his hypotheses for how the germs were supposed to invade a host in order to cause disease as “seen” in nature, thus invalidating his results.

On top of that, Pasteur also misinterpreted what he was working with in regard to chicken cholera, and he was unsuccessful in isolating any microbe as the causative agent for rabies, further invalidating those experiments as he had no valid independent variable (assumed causative agent) that he was working with.

There were also issues with the vaccines that were produced by Pasteur, with his chicken cholera vaccine determined to be ineffective while his rabies vaccine was linked to causing the very disease it was supposed to prevent.

Regardless, Pasteur is regularly regarded as a bona-fide hero and a scientific savant, given such titles as “the Father of Microbiology,” “the Father of Immunology,” “the Father of Bacteriology,” etc. He is considered a savior for taking old ideas, dusting them off, and then selling them back to the public as his own.

However, while Pasteur is credited with developing and popularizing the germ hypothesis, he did not “prove” that germs cause disease. According to the book Science, Medicine, and Animals published by the National Research Council and the National Academy of Sciences, that glory belongs to German physician and microbiologist Robert Koch.

It is stated that the discoveries of Robert Koch led Louis Pasteur to describe how small organisms called germs could invade the body and cause disease. The book goes on to say that it was Koch who conclusively established that particular germs could cause specific diseases, and that he did so beginning with his experiments investigating anthrax.

This is backed up by Hardvard University’s Curiosity Collection, which states that Koch is “credited with proving that specific germs caused anthrax, cholera, and tuberculosis.” They point out that Koch’s Postulates, the four criteria designed to establish a causal relationship between a microbe and a disease, “are fundamental to the germ theory” and that they “prove both that specific germs cause specific diseases and that disease germs transmit disease from one body to another.”

While Pasteur also believed in the idea, it is Robert Koch who is the one who is credited with developing the concept of “one pathogen for one disease.” Unsurprisingly, the Robert Koch Institute also states that it was Koch, and not Pasteur, who was “the first to prove that a micro-organism was the cause of an infectious disease.”

Thus, while it should be argued that Louis Pasteur falsified his germ hypothesis, at the very least, it can easily be said that his work, by itself, was insufficient to prove his germ hypothesis.

In order to “prove” the germ hypothesis, the work of Robert Koch is considered integral due to his innovative techniques involving new staining practices that allowed for greater visualization, and his utilization of “appropriate” media to culture bacteria in a pure form.

The four logical postulates that developed over the course of his work, known as Koch’s Postulates, have stood for two centuries as the “gold standard” for establishing the microbiological etiology of “infectious” disease.

The postulates are considered so essential that, according to a 2015 paper by Ross and Woodyard, they are “mentioned in nearly all beginning microbiology textbooks” and “continue to be viewed as an important standard for establishing causal relationships in biomedicine.”

Lester S. King, a Harvard educated medical doctor who authored many books on the history and philosophy of medicine, wrote in his 1952 paper Dr. Koch’s Postulates that Koch’s contribution was in “forging a chain of evidence which connected a specific bacterium and a given disease.”

King stated that this chain was so strong and so convincing “that his principles have been exalted as ‘postulates’ and considered a model for all future work.”

As Koch’s contributions to “proving” the germ hypothesis appear to be even greater than that of Louis Pasteur, we will examine the three main contributions that he supplied to the effort, with a primary focus on his work with anthrax, followed by tuberculosis and cholera.

We will inspect his experimental approach in order to see if it was reflective of anything that occurred naturally within the physical world. We will see if Koch’s experimental evidence actually fulfilled his own logical postulates for proving microbes as the cause of disease.

What will be clear by the end of this investigation is that the combined efforts of both Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch were not enough to confirm the germ hypothesis, and contrary to popular belief, actually led to the falsification of the entire doctrine.

Robert Koch began his investigations into anthrax in 1876 while he was a district medical officer running a clinical practice in Wöllstein. At the time, the disease was attributed to the death of 528 people and 56,000 livestock over the course of a four-year period.

The prevailing hypothesis was that it was a soil-derived disease as certain pastures were said to be “dangerous” to the grazing livestock and could remain so for years. It had been reported by previous researchers, with “decisive” claims by French biologist Casimir Davaine according to Koch, that certain rod-shaped bacterium were present in the blood of the animals suffering disease, and that the disease could be transmitted by inoculating healthy animals with the blood from the diseased animals.

Davaine proposed that the anthrax disease, that developed without demonstrable direct transmission in humans and animals, was due to the spread of a bacterium which he had discovered remained viable for a long time in a dried state, by air currents, insects and the like.

However, as noted by Koch in his famous 1876 paper Die Ätiologie der Milzbrand-Krankheit, begründet auf die Entwicklungsgeschichte des Bacillus Anthracis, these reports were refuted by other researchers who showed conflicting results where the rod-shaped bacterium was not found within the blood after fatal injections with the bacterium, and that injections of blood without the bacterium were also able to cause the disease.

Koch noted that it had been pointed out that anthrax does not depend solely on a contagium which is spread above ground, but that the disease was undoubtedly related to soil conditions, stating that it was “more significant in wet years and is mainly concentrated in the months of August and September, when the ground heat curve reaches its peak.”

He went on to say that “these conditions cannot be explained by Davaine’s assumption, and their inadequacy has led many to deny the importance of bacteria for anthrax.” This led Koch to state that Davaine was “only partly correct” in his assumption that the bacterium was resistant to heat and other conditions, and that his own experiments would show that the bacterium altered its state based upon the environmental conditions.

This was in reference to the spore-like form of the bacterium that Koch had discovered through his investigation, which he claimed was dormant and much more resistant to environmental factors than the active “vegetable” form.

According to Koch, it was this spore form of the bacterium that the livestock ingested when grazing, and when it was deprived of oxygen inside the body, it would become pathogenic. Thus, it was the conditions of the environment that the bacterium was in that determined whether it was pathogenic or not.

Koch believed that anthrax was most definitely a “soil-dependent infectious disease,” and as such, it would be logical to assume that his experiments reflected this observation and involved feeding the affected livestock the bacterium in its supposed pathogenic state.

Did Koch’s experiments reflect his assumption and reproduce the disease as it supposedly occurred in nature? Let’s find out.

To begin with, Koch stated that, according to Prof. F. Cohns, “in the blood and tissue fluids of the living animal the bacilli multiply extraordinarily rapidly in the same way as observed in various other species of bacteria.”

However, Koch admitted that he had not directly observed this himself but felt that it could be deduced from his experiments.

To figure out how this “soil-based disease” affected livestock such as sheep, Koch resorted to experiments involving mice. He began his work by removing the spleens of “infected” carcasses and then extracted the blood.

He would inject the blood into healthy mice using wood splinters as a syringe. At first, he attempted inoculating the mice by their ears or the middle of the tail, but he considered this “unsafe” as the bacterium could be removed by rubbing and licking.

In other words, the mice may consume the bacterium, which is the proposed natural route of “infection.” Why this was considered “unsafe” for the mice when the purpose was to “infect” and kill them is left to the imagination, unless Koch considered it unsafe for himself to have the bacterium spread around his lab.

Regardless, he eventually created wounds in the back of the tails of the mice and dropped the bacterium into the wounds.

After killing a mouse, a consecutive series of several injections would take place where new mice were inoculated with the spleen substance that had been incubated in beef serum of the mice that had recently been killed.

While Koch claimed that he was successful in his attempts to kill the mice, the question of what actually killed them, whether it was carbonic acid in the blood or whether it was toxic cleavage products of proteins, remained unanswered. Koch preferred the latter explanation.

Interestingly, it may have been a different acid that could have caused harm to the animals that Koch experimented on as he admitted to using carbolic acid (a.k.a. phenol) as a disinfectant during his experiments.

Carbolic acid is a coal-tar derivative that is a toxic compound that can affect various biological systems even at low concentrations. While it was popularized by Lord Joseph Lister in the 1860s and used as an antiseptic for decades, due to its irritant and corrosive properties as well as the potential systemic toxicity, phenol is not commonly used as an antiseptic anymore.

Even Lord Lister regretted having ever recommended its use and abandoned carbolic acid spray and in the 1890s stating, “I feel ashamed that I should ever have recommended it (the spray) for the purpose of destroying the microbes in the air.”

Koch was known for testing carbolic acid in respect to its spore-killing powers. Could these trace amounts of carbolic acid that he knew were left over on his equipment after disinfecting them contributed to any disease in his animals that was seen in his experiments?

In his 1879 paper Investigations into the Etiology of Traumatic Infectious Diseases, Koch stated that the spleen material must be used as the blood contained few bacilli, which is rather odd as the CDC states that the blood is used for bacterial culture and diagnosis of anthrax.

Thus, it would appear that, according to Koch, the spleen material is the prime source of the pathogenic anthrax spores needed to kill animals experimentally. However, injecting spleen materials into mice does not reflect the hypothesis as to how natural “infection” with the bacterium would occur in nature amongst grazing livestock.

Knowing this, Koch attempted to demonstrate pathogenicity using the anthrax bacterium in a way that would more closely reflect his hypothesis on how sheep would acquire the disease…by once again using mice.

To reflect his hypothesized exposure route, Koch decided to feed the mice the bacterium. Nonetheless, this “natural” exposure consisted of feeding the mice the spleens of rabbits and sheep that had died of the disease, which is obviously not a natural part of the diet of a mouse.

He stated that the mice ate more than their body weight in anthrax as they are “extremely voracious” eaters. Regardless of the unnatural feed and the copious amount of bacterium ingested, none of the mice became sick.

As this attempt was a failure, he tried putting a spore-containing liquid in their food, which the mice once again consumed more than their body weight in with no ill effect. Rabbits were also fed spore-containing masses and remained healthy.

Therefore, in these experiments, Koch had actually disproven his hypothesis that the anthrax bacterium could cause the disease upon ingestion via a more closely simulated natural “infection” route (minus the use of diseased spleens from other animals) based upon the observed natural phenomenon.

This is taken from a long document. Read the rest here substack.com

Header image: Institut Pasteur

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