How it began
Alphonse Laveran, a French army physician, was sent to Bone in Algeria in 1878 and remained in the country until 1883. He carried out his main research on malaria first at Bone and later at Constantine. In 1880, at the military hospital in Constantine, he saw on the edges of pigmented spherical bodies in the blood of a malaria patient thread-like elements that moved very rapidly and displaced the neighboring red cells. He concluded that he was looking at a living parasite.
How it works
Malaria is caused by a single-celled parasite, a protozoan later named Plasmodium, that lives in the red blood cells of an infected person. Laveran found it by examining patients' blood under the microscope. He was also the first to express the view that the parasite must live outside the human body as a parasite of mosquitoes, which Ronald Ross later proved through patient research.
Who pushed back
Laveran's first communications on the malaria parasites were received with much skepticism. In 1882 he went to Rome to look for the same parasites in the blood of patients infected in the Roman Campagna, and his work at the San Spirito Hospital confirmed his opinion. Gradually scientists in other countries published confirming research, and in 1889 the Academy of Sciences awarded him the Breant Prize for a discovery that from then on was not disputed.
What lasted
The Linda Hall Library describes the finding as the first association of a protozoan with a human illness. Laveran went on to study trypanosomes and other protozoa for 27 years, and received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1907 for his work on the role of protozoa in causing diseases. He gave half the prize money to found the Laboratory of Tropical Medicine at the Pasteur Institute and in 1908 founded the Societe de Pathologie Exotique.
