Flix Mesnil

Vocation

French zoologist, biologist, botanist, mycologist and algologist. He worked at the Pasteur Institute as an assistant of Louis Pasteur, conducting studies on cellular immunity, physiology and comparative pathology in the laboratory of Ilya Ilyich Metchnikov (1845–1916). In 1903, together with Alphonse Laveran (1845–1922), he showed that the parasite responsible for the visceral leishmaniasis (or "Kala-azar", a fever in India), first described by William Boog Leishman (1865–1926), is a new protozoa, different from Trypanosoma, the agent of the sleeping sickness, and from Plasmodium, the agent of paludism (malaria). In 1920, he and Émile Roubaud achieved the first experimental infection of chimpanzees with Plasmodium vivax. He founded the Pasteur Institute Bulletin with Gabriel Bertrand (1867–1962), Alexandre Besredka (1870–1940), Amédée Borrel (1867–1936), Camille Delezenne (1868–1932) and Auguste-Charles Marie (1864–1935). He died on 15 February 1938 in Paris. Link to Wikipedia biography