Alexandre Yersin
Alexandre Emile Jean Yersin (22 September 1863 – 1 March 1943) was a Swiss and naturalized French physician and bacteriologist. He is remembered as the discoverer of the bacillus responsible for the bubonic plague or pest, which was later named in his honour (Yersinia pestis).
Life
Yersin was born in 1863 in Aubonne, Canton of Vaud, Switzerland, to a family originally from France. From 1883 to 1884, Yersin studied medicine at Lausanne, Switzerland; and then at Marburg, Germany and Paris (1884–1886). In 1886, he entered Louis Pasteur's research laboratory at the École Normale Supérieure, by invitation of Emile Roux, and participated in the development of the anti-rabies serum. In 1888 he received his doctorate with a dissertation entitled Étude sur le Développement du Tubercule Expérimental and spent two months with Robert Koch in Germany. He joined the recently created Pasteur Institute in 1889 as Roux's collaborator, and discovered with him the diphtheric toxin (produced by the Corynebacterium diphtheriae bacillus).
