Johannes Fibiger was a Danish bacteriologist whose early work on childhood diphtheria and tuberculosis demonstrated the vital role medical research could play in controlling diseases that threatened public health. In 1926, Fibiger received the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for demonstrating how cancer-like tissues could be induced experimentally in the laboratory.
Johannes Andreas Grib Fibiger was born on April 23, 1867, in the Danish village of Silkeborg. His father, Christian Fibiger, was a district physician; his mother, Elfride Muller, was a writer and the daughter of a Danish politician. When Fibiger was three, his father died and the family moved to Copenhagen, where he attended the University of Copenhagen at age sixteen and studied medicine, biology, and zoology. After earning his medical degree in 1890, he undertook several years of medical apprenticeship in various hospitals and with the Danish army. In 1891, he married Mathilde Fibiger, a distant cousin and physician's daughter, with whom he had two children.
It was while working as an assistant in a bacteriological laboratory at the University of Copenhagen that Fibiger was persuaded to undertake doctoral work on diphtheria, a virulent childhood disease that caused its victims to suffocate. Fibiger discovered better methods of growing diphtheria bacteria in the laboratory and demonstrated that there were two distinct forms of the bacillus, an important step in identifying carriers of the disease who frequently displayed no symptoms. At the turn of the century, diphtheria was a major public health problem, and epidemics were frequent in Denmark and throughout the rest of the developed world. Fibiger produced an experimental serum against the disease and carefully monitored the results of an inoculation program. In 1897, the International Medical Congress published his report, a model of its kind, which brought Fibiger international attention and confirmed the effectiveness of the serum. The young scientist had received his Ph.D. only two years earlier. Fibiger later came to regard his work on diphtheria as his highest scientific achievement.
In 1900, at age thirty-three, he joined the faculty of the Institute of Pathological Anatomy, one of a number of young professors hired by the University of Copenhagen. He was also appointed director of the institute and launched a successful program to construct a modern research facility for pathology and anatomy. Within its walls, Fibiger and another faculty member, C. O. Jenson, conducted research on tuberculosis in cattle and humans. Flying in the face of popular opinion, they demonstrated that humans could contract tuberculosis from infected cattle, especially by drinking their milk. Supported by the research of other investigators in Europe, these findings led to the passage of strict regulations governing the sale of raw milk, resulting in fewer adolescent deaths due to tuberculosis.
Seeks to Produce Cancer in the Laboratory
Fibiger's experiments on tubercular rats led him to the discovery for which he won the Nobel Prize. Performing a series of routine dissections in 1907, he discovered abscesses that appeared to be cancerous in the stomach lining of three wild rats. Microscopic examination revealed that the abscesses contained the larvae of a minute parasitic worm or nematode.
By the early 1900s, scientists had ample observational data suggesting that environmental irritants such as soot and harsh chemicals produced cancer in chimney sweeps and chemical workers. Many scientists thought that chronic irritation from mechanical or chemical agents was the basis of all cancer, but no one had yet succeeded in turning normal cells into cancerous cells under laboratory conditions.
Working on the hypothesis that the parasites produced a chemical toxin that induced cancer of the stomach, Fibiger undertook an ambitious research program. He trapped and examined more than a thousand wild rats, feeding them worm larvae, and even injecting them with the parasite, all without result. Surmising that the larvae was not passed from rat to rat but through an intermediate host, he traced the parasite to a rare species of cockroach found near a Copenhagen sugar refinery. By feeding healthy rats a diet of white bread and cockroaches, Fibiger finally succeeded in producing stomach abscesses in more than a hundred animals. For the first time, a researcher had induced what at the time was thought to be cancer in a laboratory setting. Fibiger reported his achievement in the Journal of Cancer Research and was awarded the 1926 Nobel Prize in medicine or physiology for his discovery of Spiroptera carcinoma, the parasitic worm that he thought had produced the cancer. Yet, in his acceptance speech, Fibiger expressed doubt that parasites played any great role in gastric cancer in humans.
Later investigators would find a number of weaknesses in Fibiger's research. Like most scientists of the period, Fibiger had not thought to check his findings against a control group of rats fed on a diet of only white bread. Nor was it easy to reproduce Fibiger's findings in other laboratories due to the lack of a standard strain of laboratory rats in the 1920s; Fibiger's animals had all been caught in the wild. Other investigators expressed doubt that the abscesses described by Fibiger were truly cancerous. There was some evidence that the abscesses might have been caused by a diet deficient in vitamin A. Nonetheless, the lasting effect of Fibiger's prize-winning discovery--later refuted by other researchers--was the great impetus it gave to other investigators to pursue laboratory research on the causes of cancer.
Fibiger abandoned parasitology after World War I to follow the work of two Japanese scientists who induced skin cancer in rabbits by painting their ears with coal tar. Conducting his own experiments by painting the backs of rats with the irritant, Fibiger reported two valuable insights: that cancer did not occur with the same frequency in all species or even within the same species, and that individual predisposition played an important role in susceptibility to cancer. At the time of his death, he was working with two colleagues on a vaccine for cancer, hoping to demonstrate that inoculating laboratory animals with matter drawn from malignant tumors would induce immunity to the disease.
During his long career as director of the Institute of Pathological Anatomy at the University of Copenhagen, Fibiger divided his time between research and teaching. He was a generous colleague who was widely respected for his meticulous laboratory methods. He published seventy-nine scientific papers and served as secretary and then president of the Danish Medical Society, and as president of the Danish Cancer Commission. He was co-editor and founder of Acta Pathologica et Microbiologica Scandinavica. In 1927, he was awarded the Nordhoff-Jung Cancer Prize.
On January 30, 1928, less than two years after delivering his Nobel Prize speech, Johannes Fibiger died in Copenhagen of a massive heart attack. He was sixty years old and had recently learned that he had colon cancer.
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