BORDET, JULES (187o– ), Belgian physiologist, was born at Soignies, June 13, 1870. In 1892 he graduated as doctor of medicine at the University of Brussels. From 1894 to 1901 he worked at the Pasteur Institute at Paris whence he was recalled to Brussels to found a "Pasteur Institute" for the prov ince of Brabant of which he was made director. He was also appointed professor at the University of Brussels and in 1919 received the Nobel Prize for medicine and physiology.
His early studies showed that antimicrobic sera include two active substances, one existing there before immunization, and known as alexine; the other a specific antibody created by vac cination. He introduced the method of diagnosing microbes by sera; and his discovery of the fixation of alexine (in the first instance for cholera) inaugurated a general method of diagnosis for infectious fevers, now universally employed for the identi fication of typhoid fever, plague, tuberculosis, etc. He discov ered haemolytic sera in 1898, and showed that they act on foreign blood by a mechanism strictly comparable with that by which an anti-microbic serum acts on microbes and, further, that the reactions of all these sera are colloidal in nature.
More recently he discovered the microbe of whooping cough, determining its action and the method of immunizing conva lescents from that disease. He has thrown light on the proc ess of the formation of coagulin, showing that it includes two elements; the first, albuminoidal and peculiar to the liquid blood, and the other, lipoidal in nature, originating in the cells of the blood or tissues. He further studied the formation of anaphylactic poisons, and, in the sphere of microbic biology, the autolysis of microbic transmissibility. Bordet's Traite de l'Immun. to dans les maladies in f ectieuses was published in 19 2o.