Portrait of the German bacteriologist Emil Adolf von Behring (1854-1917). He obtained his medical degree in 1880 in Berlin and in 1889 became assistant to Kock at the Institute for Infectious Diseases in Berlin. In 1890 Behring, together with Kitasato, showed that immunity from tetanus could be achieved by injecting some blood serum obtained from an infected animal. In doing this he believed that an antitoxin of tetanus was present in the blood serum. Together with Ehrlich he found the same antitoxic immunity with diphtheria, at that time a major killer of children. For his work he received in 1901 the first Nobel Prize awarded in medicine and physiology.