Jules Bordet

Jules Bordet's grave in Ixelles Cemetery

Jules Jean Baptiste Vincent Bordet (Soignies (Belgium) 13 June 1870 – 6 April 1961) was a Belgian immunologist and microbiologist. The bacterial genus Bordetella is named after him.

[edit] Biography

He graduated in the year 1892 as Doctor of Medicine at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (Brussels, Belgium) and began his work at the Pasteur Institute in Paris in 1894, where, in the laboratory of Elie Metchnikoff, he described phagocytosis of bacteria by white blood cells. In 1898 he described hemolysis evoked by exposure of blood serum to foreign blood cells.

In 1900, he left Paris to found the Pasteur Institute in Brussels, and made his discovery that the bacteriolytic effect of acquired specific antibody is significantly enhanced in vivo by the presence of innate serum components which he termed alexine (but which are now known as complement). This mechanism became the basis for complement-fixation testing methods that enabled the development of serological tests for syphilis (specifically, the development of the Wassermann test by August von Wassermann). The same technique is used today in serologic testing for countless other diseases.

With Octave Gengou he isolated Bordetella pertussis in pure culture in 1906 and posited it as the cause of whooping cough. He became Professor of Bacteriology at the Université Libre de Bruxelles in 1907.

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to him in 1919 for his discoveries relating to immunity.

Bordet died in 1961 and was interred in the Ixelles Cemetery in Brussels. He was a freemason and member of the lodge Les Amis Philanthropes of the Grand Orient of Belgium in Brussels.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] See also

• Institut Jules Bordet

[edit] External links

• Jules Bordet
• The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1919
• Jules Bordet Institute
• Jules Bordet Museum
• Bordet Page at Find-A-Grave