Stanley Falkow

Stanley "Stan" Falkow (January 24, 1934 – May 5, 2018) was an American microbiologist and a professor of microbiology at Georgetown University, University of Washington, and Stanford University School of Medicine. Falkow is known as the father of the field of molecular microbial pathogenesis. He formulated molecular Koch's postulates, which have guided the study of the microbial determinants of infectious diseases since the late 1980s. Falkow spent over 50 years uncovering molecular mechanisms of how bacteria cause disease and how to disarm them. Falkow also was one of the first scientists to investigate antimicrobial resistance, and presented his research extensively to scientific, government, and lay audiences explaining the spread of resistance from one organism to another, now known as horizontal gene transfer, and the implications of this phenomenon on our ability to combat infections in the future.

Falkow was born into a Yiddish-speaking household in Albany, New York. His father was a shoe salesman and had immigrated from Soviet Kyiv, Ukraine. His mother came from a family of Jewish immigrants from Poland. She "rented several of their bedrooms and later opened a corset shop". Falkow's family was working-class to poor as he described in his memoir. He was therefore a first-generation Jewish American. Falkow worked at a toy shop in order to collect enough money to buy a model microscope, as well as admitted to stealing textbooks, one a nurse's book on infectious diseases, in order to explore microbiology as a career path despite his family's financial situation.

Falkow attributed his early interest in microbiology to reading Microbe Hunters in 1943, when he was 11 years old, which he found at the public library after the family had moved to Newport, Rhode Island. The book is a dramatization of microbiological research written by American microbiologist Paul de Kruif. Because of poor grades until his senior year of high school, an adviser suggested military rather than college. Falkow described himself as an average student, and below average at mathematics, which he later rectified by working through workbooks of high school and college level mathematics later in his career, after earning his Ph.D., in order to analyze and design experiments. In his memoir, Falkow gives credit to his teachers and acknowledges the role that the systemic oppression of women in America in the 1940s–1950s played in his life, stating "I now understand that I was the beneficiary of the repression of women by our society. The best and brightest women in many communities were relegated to the one intellectual role deemed suitable for them. They became teachers and many poured their love of language, science, music and art into students like me."

Falkow enrolled in biology at the University of Maine, because of their microbiology department. During the summers he worked in pathology at the hospital in Newport, staining slides and assisting in autopsies. He graduated in 1955. Before he started graduate school at University of Michigan he developed extreme anxiety. He was later diagnosed with agoraphobia. He avoided movie theaters and crowded places between 1955 and 1983 and dropped out of his first attempt at graduate school because of recurring panic attacks. He returned to Rhode Island to live with his parents and work at the Newport Hospital as a technician, focusing on bacteriology and processing and examining patient samples. He re-enrolled in graduate school at Brown University and graduated with a PhD in 1961.

He finished his work for his Ph.D. thesis at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research (WRAIR) in the Department of Bacterial Immunology. While at Walter Reed, he worked with African-American microbiologist Othello Washington. Washington was older and more experienced than Falkow, but was assigned to be Stan's technician. Upon meeting, Falkow and Washington decided it would be more appropriate and better for both men to work together as a team. The two men worked together on isolating mobile genetic elements and the transfer of genes between E. coli and Salmonella and published a paper together about Proteus species. Falkow also worked with Shigella species and contracted dysentery, which lead to hospitalization, after being exposed to infected monkey feces flung at his face by an infected monkey. Multiple times through his training and early career more senior scientists, some Nobel prize winners, recommended that Falkow focus more on mechanisms of gene expression and less on pathogens because "nobody cares about typhoid". Falkow remained interested in pathogens despite many warnings from his peers and supervisors that infectious diseases were not interesting and were becoming less frequent in wealthy countries and were therefore a diminishing field of study.

His early work in the 1960s focused on the genetic mechanisms, which enable bacteria to become resistant to antibiotics. He showed that organisms, such as Shigella, can possess DNA fragments called plasmids which exist apart from the bacterial chromosome, and that they carry specialized information for survival. Under selective pressure from antibiotics, one species of bacteria can pass its plasmids to another directly without mating, thereby preserving its own specialized survival genes.

In 1966, he joined Georgetown University School of Medicine as a professor of microbiology. He later moved to Seattle to join the faculty of the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the University of Washington School of Medicine. Here he described how meningitis and gonorrhea organisms acquire plasmids to become resistant to penicillin and other antibiotics.

In the 1970s, Falkow shifted his focus to the infection process. During this period, he showed that a life-threatening diarrhea prevalent in many developing countries is caused by a sub-type of E. coli. He also co-authored (with Royston C. Clowes, Stanley N. Cohen, Roy Curtiss III, Naomi Datta and Richard Novick) a proposal for uniform nomenclature for bacterial plasmids.