Leopold Kirschner

In 1921 Kirschner joined the Pasteur Institute[14] at Bandung, Java, in the Dutch East Indies (present-day Indonesia) where he served as Deputy Director of the Institute under Louis Otten.[15] The Institute was responsible for preparing vaccines and carrying out diagnostic services for 70 million people. While there, Kirschner undertook important work on the survival in the environment of the bacteria that causes leptospirosis,[2] and he and a colleague developed an effective vaccine against plague, testing early versions on themselves. Kirschner’s work in Java was cut short by the Japanese invasion in 1942. He and wife Alice, a gifted violinist from Vienna, survived and provided considerable covert assistance to other prisoners using his scientific knowledge.[16]

Kirschner was recruited to the University of Otago Medical School by Dr – later Sir – Charles Hercus in 1946, to the Medical Research Council Microbiology Unit.[17] At the time of his arrival, New Zealand was considered to be free of leptospirosis, an assumption based in part on the absence of native terrestrial mammalian hosts.[18] However, Kirschner noted that many mammalian species that could serve as hosts of Leptospira spp had been introduced to New Zealand, and that measures at ports to prevent rats being imported on ships were weak.[7] Kirschner hypothesized that leptospirosis was very likely to be present and responsible for febrile illness among farmers in New Zealand. He established a leptospirosis reference laboratory at the University of Otago Medical School, confirming with Dr – later Sir – Edward G. Sayers, future Dean of the Otago Medical School, human leptospirosis in New Zealand for the first time in a sharemilker from Auckland in 1949.[7] Then with Mr – later Professor – A. Neil Bruère the first livestock and occupational disease outbreak among dairy farm workers in Westland in 1951.[8] Kirschner promoted close collaboration between human and animal health experts, known today as the ‘One Health’ approach. Kirschner and colleagues went on to describe the major leptospirosis problem among dairy farmers in New Zealand;[9] studied factors supporting and inhibiting Leptospira growth;[4][5][6] and procedures for the culture, isolation, and identification Leptospira.[6] Kirschner was an important early influence on the career of a generation of leptospirosis experts, including Professor Solomon Faine,[19] Monash University, and Professor Roger Marshall,[20] Massey University. Kirschner died in Dunedin on 23 November 1970 and is buried with wife Alice Kirschner at the Dunedin Southern Cemetery.[21]