Paul Ehrlich's Magic Bullets

March 14, 2004, marks the 150th anniversary of the birth of Paul Ehrlich, one of the generation of pioneers who, during the 50 years that led up to World War I, laid the foundation of modern medicine. Pasteur, Röntgen, Curie, Koch, Freud, and Lister were his contemporaries in this company of trailblazers.Ehrlich's prodigious talents in the laboratory — he was called a virtuoso of test tubes — were matched by a combination of intuition and deduction that marked him as a genius. He was the father of hematology, a revolutionary immunologist, and the creator of the field of chemotherapy. . . .