Léon Charles Albert Calmette ForMemRS (; 12 July 1863 – 29 October 1933) was a French physician, bacteriologist and immunologist, and an important officer of the Pasteur Institute. He co-discovered the Bacillus Calmette-Guérin, an attenuated form of Mycobacterium bovis used in the BCG vaccine against tuberculosis. He also developed the first antivenom for snake venom, the Calmette's serum.

Early career

Calmette was born in Nice, France to Guillame Calmette and Adèle Charpentier on July 12, 1863. He studied at various schools in Clermont-Ferrand, including the Lycée Saint-Charles in Saint-Brieucand, in Brest, as well as at Lycée Saint-Louis in Paris. Calmette wanted to become a sailor and serve in the Navy, but a bout of typhoid at age 13 made him medically unfit. So in 1881 he joined the Navy as a physician getting his training at the School of Naval Physicians at Brest. In 1883 he began medical practice in the Naval Medical Corps in Hong Kong, where he worked with Patrick Manson. Together they studied the mosquito transmission of the parasitic worm, filaria, the cause of elephantiasis. Calmette completed his medical degree on the subject of filariasis. He was then assigned to Saint-Pierre and Miquelon, where he arrived in 1887. Afterwards, he served in West Africa, in Gabon and French Congo, where he continued research on malaria, sleeping sickness and pellagra.

Association with Pasteur

Upon his return to France in 1890, Calmette met Louis Pasteur (1822–1895) and Emile Roux (1853–1933), who was his professor in a course on bacteriology. He became an associate and was charged by Pasteur to found and direct a branch of the Pasteur Institute at Saigon (French Indochina), in 1891

He also took part in the development in the first immune serum against the bubonic plague (black pest), in collaboration with the discoverer of its pathogenic agent, Yersinia pestis, by Alexandre Yersin (1863–1943), and went to Portugal to study and to help fight a plague epidemic at Porto in 1899. The German microbiologist Robert Koch had discovered, in 1882, that its pathogenic agent was the tubercle bacillus, Mycobacterium tuberculosis, and Louis Pasteur became interested in it too. In 1906, a veterinarian and immunologist working at the Institut Pasteur de Lille, Camille Guérin, established that immunity against tuberculosis was associated with the living tubercle bacilli in the blood. Using Pasteur's approach, Calmette investigated how immunity would develop in response to attenuated bovine bacilli injected in animals. This preparation received the name of its two discoverers (Bacillum Calmette-Guérin, or BCG, for short). Attenuation was achieved by repeatedly cultivating them in a bile-containing substrate, based on a theory of Norwegian researcher Kristian Feyer Andvord (1855–1934). From 1908 to 1921, Guérin and Calmette strived to produce less and less virulent strains of the bacillus, by transferring them to successive cultures. Finally, in 1921, they used BCG to successfully vaccinate newborn infants in the Hôpital de la Charité in Paris.

The vaccination program, however, suffered a serious setback in 1930 when 72 vaccinated children developed tuberculosis in Lübeck, Germany, due to a contamination of some vaccine batches in Germany. Mass vaccination of children was reinstated in many countries after 1932, when new and safer production techniques were implemented. Notwithstanding, Calmette was deeply shaken by the event, dying one year later, in Paris.

Personal life

He was the brother of Gaston Calmette (1858–1914), the editor of Le Figaro who was shot and killed in 1914 by Henriette Caillaux after running a long press campaign against her husband. In Cambodia, a major hospital was named after him, Calmette Hospital.

References

Bibliography

  • Léon Charles Albert Calmette. WhoNamedIt site.
  • Albert Calmette (1863–1933). Repères Chronologiques. Institut Pasteur, Paris (In French).