MAHATMA. The Savior Mankind Never Knew

This book—an integral part of the international project launched by Aleksander Duel, a descendant of Waldemar Haffkine’s elder brother, to promote the name of Dr. Haffkine—was released on August 10, 2019, the day the Haffkine Institute in India celebrated its 120th anniversary. The English translation has been released to celebrate the 160th anniversary of Dr. Haffkine’s birth.

MAHATMA is the true story of Waldemar Haffkine (1860–1930), a Russian-Jewish microbiologist who invented early vaccines against cholera and plague. He was a vivid example of the brave first generation of modern bacteriologists, a medical expert willing to put his body on the line for his work, testing his vaccines’ effectiveness first on himself. Renowned English surgeon Sir Joseph Lister called him “the great savior of mankind,” but his name is mostly unknown today.

Dr. Haffkine was born on March 15, 1860, in Odessa, then in the Russian Empire, today in Ukraine. In 1879, the young man entered the Faculty of Natural Sciences at Imperial Novorossiya University. Among his professors was Ilya Mechnikov, later a Nobel laureate, sometimes called one of the fathers of immunology.

From the time he was a young man, Waldemar had wanted to change the world for the better. He began by participating actively in an underground terrorist organization in Odessa but quit his homeland soon after, eventually finding his way to the Institute Pasteur in Paris. Creating vaccines against deadly diseases that have plagued people since time immemorial is a feat no less remarkable than healing people from the ulcer of political and social injustice. In a world that has no place for mercy, fighting epidemics is the scientist’s calling. Moreover, if the cost of victory in this fight is one's own life, that is a justifiable sacrifice. Haffkine worked day in and day out, night in and night out and conducted experiments on hundreds of laboratory animals. Finally, after much trial and error, he developed the first Havkin's lymph, the cholera vaccine, in the summer of 1892.

Soon after this important discovery, Haffkine was appointed State Bacteriologist of the British Crown in India, where a cholera epidemic was raging, mowing down whole villages. After two years of hard work, Haffkine succeeded at reducing mortality in epidemic-affected areas as much as three quarters. In the autumn of 1896, the plague came to Bombay. As a matter of urgency, the State Epidemiologist relocated from Calcutta to this largest Indian port. In the Old Town, in the governor’s residence, left over from Portuguese rule, Haffkine developed a plague vaccine within three months and tested it on himself on January 10, 1897.

The Haffkine anti-plague vaccine began its journey in Bombay and spread worldwide. Over the next 100 years, more than 400 million vaccines were produced and distributed all over the world.

Waldemar Haffkine never did find personal happiness, but he did save millions of lives with his miracleworking Havkin's lymph. He died alone on October 26, 1930, in Lausanne, Switzerland, at age 70.