A Czech researcher and Pneumocystis.

Abstract

In 1909, two years after the birth of Otto Jirovec (figure 1) in Bohemia, Carlos Chagas described an organism in the lungs of infected guinea pigs that he named Schizotrypanum cruzi [1, 2]. In 1912, Antonio Carini noted these same organisms in the lungs of rats. Both researchers were convinced that what they had observed was a type of trypanosome. However, later that year, at the Pasteur Institute, the husband-and-wife team of Delanoe and Delanoe [3] demonstrated that the cysts observed in the lungs of Carini's rats were unrelated to trypanosomes and named the organism Pneumocystis carinii. In the 1930s and 1940s, an epidemic form of pneumonia was recognized in European infants who were born prematurely [1]. This called plasma cell pneumonia, was associated with death by the age of 6 months [4]. It was not until 1951 that Otto Jirovec, along with Joseph Vanek, demonstrated that the etiologic agent of interstitial plasma cell pneumonia was Pneumocystis. Otto Jirovec started out as a zoologist studying microsporidia and later contributed to the understanding of Trichomonas vaginalis, Toxoplasma, and Leptospira [5]. However, he is most famous for his work on Pneumocystis, both for his initial description of the species that infects humans and later for his studies of its development and epidemiology. In 1976, four years after Otto Jirovec's death, Jacob Frenkel proposed to use the name of Pneumocystis carinii for the species that infects rats and to use Pneumocystis jerovici for the species that infects humans, on the basis of the knowledge that interspecies infection was not experimentally possible [2]. In the late 1980s, RNA analysis demonstrated that Pneumocystis was a fungus, not a protozoa [6, 7]. Ironically, it was not until 1999, after this change in taxonomy, that the species of Pneumocystis that infects humans was renamed Pneumocystis jiroveci after the great Czech parasitologist [2].