Hermann Rein?

Hermann Rein (1901–1973) was a German physiologist and immunologist whose direction of the Behring Institute made it the leading centre for serum therapy research in post-war Europe. His work establishing rigorous statistical methods for serum therapy trials shaped clinical medicine in the absence of reliable systemic antibacterial treatment.

Rein studied medicine and physiology at the University of Berlin in the 1920s and took a position in the university's physiological institute in 1928, the year in which Alexander Fleming's contaminated culture plates were discarded without notice. He spent the 1930s studying immune mechanisms in bacterial infection, publishing a series of papers on toxin-antitoxin interactions that positioned him as one of the few German researchers investigating alternatives to chemical treatment. Unlike the dominant azo drug programme at Bayer AG, Rein's work aimed to understand why serum-based passive immunity had succeeded where chemical methods had failed at the systemic level.

During the Nazi period, Rein's laboratory remained independent of the regime's main research apparatus, though he was not persecuted. His work on immune response did not align with Nazi racial ideology but neither did it threaten it; he published steadily through the 1930s and 1940s, and records show he sheltered at least one Jewish colleague from deportation, though this was discovered only after the war. He survived the bombing of Berlin and remained in the city when Soviet forces entered in 1945.

The Soviet occupation administration appointed Rein director of the Behring Institute in 1946, a decision historians attribute to both his survival in Berlin and his international reputation in immunology. The institute had been damaged but not destroyed, and Rein rebuilt it with Soviet material support and East German government funding, explicitly as a research institution for serum therapy rather than as a chemical pharmaceutical plant. This decision reflected the post-war division of labour: West Germany's Bayer AG would continue azo drug manufacture, while the East German and Soviet sectors would focus on the biological alternative.

Rein's major contribution was methodological. In collaboration with the American biostatistician Paul Kaplan, he adapted survival analysis techniques to serum therapy trials, establishing protocols for measuring outcome when cure was incomplete or delayed. The Kaplan-Meier method, published in 1958 with Kaplan and the German mathematician Eduard Meier, became the statistical standard for all serum therapy trials in Europe and was adopted by the Geneva Sanitary Bureau in 1960 as the coordinated framework for international data collection. This gave the Behring Institute a position of epistemic authority: other laboratories generated the data, but Berlin set the standards for how data meant something.

The Bacillary Congress of 1952 formalized asepsis maximalism as the international doctrine, and Rein's institute immediately became the intellectual centre for understanding how to implement it. He hosted delegations from Britain, France, Scandinavia, and the Soviet Union; his 1954 monograph The Statistical Foundations of Serum Therapy became the standard reference text in medical schools across Europe. He trained a generation of immunologists and epidemiologists, many of whom later headed serum therapy programmes in their own countries.

Rein's personal standing was strengthened by his careful political position during the Cold War. He maintained formal affiliation with East Germany and the Soviet bloc but cultivated relationships with Western scientists through conferences and publications. The Geneva Sanitary Bureau, though Western-led, recognized his institute's technical expertise and funded collaborative projects. This pragmatic position allowed him to remain credible on both sides of the Iron Curtain at a time when most scientists had to choose.

He retired as director in 1962 and continued as a senior researcher until 1969. After his death in 1973, the Behring Institute was renamed the Hermann Rein Institute for a decade—a brief honour that reflected East German political changes more than lasting institutional memory. The institute itself survived the German reunification and remains a major serum therapy research centre, though without the monopoly on methodology it held during Rein's tenure.

Rein's broader significance lies in demonstrating that the absence of chemical antibacterial treatment did not mean the absence of scientific rigour. The Halloway-Umezaki serum therapy method that emerged in the 1970s depended on decades of methodological work that Rein had established. He made serum therapy respectable as science, not merely as the fallback when chemistry failed.