Google honours Polish immunologist Rudolf Weigl with a special doodle on his 138th birth anniversary

Google is celebrating Polish immunologist Rudolf Stefan Weigl's 138th birth anniversary with a special doodle. The doodle shows the scientist looking through a test tube, surrounded by beakers, microscope, lice and bacteria.

From studying a tiny louse to saving thousands of human lives, the inventor produced the first vaccine that ended one of the oldest and most-infectious diseases of humanity - typhus.

Weigl's work was honoured with two Nobel Prize nominations, but his application was either withdrawn by the Polish government or never processed for candidacy.

Born in the Austro-Hungarian town of Przerów (now Czech Republic), Weigl pursued his education in biological sciences at Lwów University in Poland.

In 1914, the Polish Army appointed Weigl as a parasitologist. The typhus-infecting bacteria, Rickettsia prowazekii, were carried by body lice and affected millions across Eastern Europe.
Determined to stop its spread and end the pandemic, Weigl adapted the tiny insect into a laboratory specimen.

"His (Weigl's) innovative research revealed how to use lice to propagate the deadly bacteria which he studied for decades with the hope of developing a vaccine," Google Doodle's website said.

Weigl’s vaccine successfully inoculated the first set of beneficiaries in 1936.

When Germany occupied Poland during the outbreak of World War II, the scientist was forced to open a vaccine production plant. He, then, hired his friends and colleagues at the facility who were at risk of persecution under the new regime.

"An estimated 5,000 people were saved due to Weigl’s work during this period - both due to his direct efforts to protect his neighbors and to the thousands of vaccine doses distributed nationwide," the website said.