In the wake of Alphonse Laveran

Abstract

Alphonse Laveran (Nobel Prize 1907) played a pioneering role in discovering the causative agent of malaria, a disease that has existed since time immemorial, and long emblematic of the miasma theory until the end of the 19th century. In 1880, this unknown military doctor discovered the role of a hematazoan in malaria, designated Plasmodium. This was the first protozoan to be discovered in an infectious disease, at a time when bacteria were mainly suspected. This major discovery led to the identification of the role of mosquitoes in the spread of malaria by Ronald Ross (Nobel Prize 1902) and Battista Grassi. The recurrence of malaria attacks over many years was for a long time an enigma only solved after the Second World War by the discovery of the exo-erythrocytic cycle of Plasmodium. Progress was then made in treatment, from cinchona bark, quinine and chloroquine, to the recent discovery of artemisinin in 1972 by the Chinese researcher Tu Youyou (Nobel Prize 2015).