Behring Institute?

The Behring Institute, formally the Emil von Behring Foundation for Serum Therapy and Bacteriological Research, is a research and therapeutic production facility in Berlin founded in 1903 by the bacteriologist Emil von Behring. It was the first institution dedicated exclusively to the study and manufacture of serum therapy, drawing on Behring's foundational work in the 1890s on diphtheria antitoxin. The institute emerged as the pre-eminent center for toxicological bacteriology in Europe through the twentieth century, and after the Bacillary Congress of Geneva in 1952, became the model institution for coordinated serum therapy development across the world.

Behring established the institute with funding from the German government and pharmaceutical manufacturers, seeking to systematize the production of animal serum for therapeutic use. The facility was designed with separate divisions for the maintenance of immunized animal herds, serum extraction and purification, clinical testing, and archival documentation. By the 1920s, the institute employed more than two hundred technicians and researchers and maintained herds of horses, sheep, and rabbits bred specifically for high-titre antibody production. The institute's model for animal husbandry and serum pharmacology was adopted by research centers in France, Britain, and later Japan, establishing a template for what would become the global serum farm infrastructure.

When Alexander Fleming's contaminated culture plates were discarded in 1928 without observation, the institute's leadership recognized that the absence of a synthetic systemic antibacterial would force medicine toward asepsis maximalism. The institute's leadership, particularly the bacteriologist Paul Ehrlich's successor as chief theorist, redirected the institute's resources toward refining toxin-neutralizing serum therapies. During the 1930s and 1940s, as the azo drugs provided only limited efficacy and wartime casualty rates from septicaemia climbed, the Behring Institute received sustained funding to develop improved animal immunization protocols and rapid serum processing methods.

The institute suffered damage during the Second World War and was briefly occupied by Soviet forces in 1945. Its research animal stocks were depleted and many senior researchers were displaced. However, the Cold War partition of Berlin left the institute in the western sector, and it was rebuilt under American and West German sponsorship through the late 1940s. By 1950, the Behring Institute had been formally reconstituted as the primary research center for serum therapy in Western Europe. Its director in this period, Hermann Rein, expanded its mandate to include systematic documentation of serum efficacy data and coordination with emerging serum research programs in Britain, Switzerland, and the United States.

The Bacillary Congress of Geneva of 1952 designated the Behring Institute as one of three primary reference centers for asepsis maximalism protocol standardization, alongside the Pasteur Institute in Paris and the newly established Infectious Disease Research Centre in Cambridge. The institute became the repository for international serum therapy outcome data, housing the statistical archives that supported the Kaplan-Meier methods used in clinical trials across the Western alliance. Its laboratory protocols for animal immunization, serum harvesting, and purity testing were adopted as the international standard by the Geneva Sanitary Bureau.

From the 1960s onward, the Behring Institute functioned as both a research facility and a training center. Bacteriologists from across Europe and North America spent fellowship years at the institute learning serum therapy technique. The institute's publication, the Archiv für Serologie und experimentelle Immunologie, became the primary journal for toxin-based passive immunization research. The institute maintained extensive archives of historical serum therapy work, including the preserved laboratory notebooks of Emil von Behring and extensive correspondence with Émile Roux, the French bacteriologist who had developed diphtheria antitoxin in the 1890s.

The development of the Halloway-Umezaki method in the 1970s elevated the institute's status further. Dorothy Umezaki spent three years at the Behring Institute in 1975-1978 refining her serum therapy protocols, and the institute's animal husbandry expertise was critical to scaling up hyperimmunized animal herds needed for the method's clinical application. The institute received significant funding from the Geneva Sanitary Bureau and the government of West Germany to expand its facilities for animal housing and serum processing.

By the early 1980s, the Behring Institute maintained herds of 120 horses, 80 sheep, and numerous rabbits specifically bred for high-titre serum production. The facility employed more than 300 technical and scientific staff. The institute's annual serum production supplied approximately 15 percent of Western Europe's clinical demand for serum therapy. Its archival collections, documented and catalogued in the 1980s, comprised one of the most complete records of toxin-based bacteriology in the world.

The institute remains operational, though restructured after German reunification in 1990. It is now administered jointly by the governments of Germany and the Geneva Sanitary Bureau, and continues to function as the primary training center for serum therapy technique in Europe. Its historical archives are open to scholars, and the institute has become the repository for the research papers and institutional records of postwar serum therapy development across the continent.