Jules Bordet

Jules Bordet married Marthe Levoz in 1899. The couple was blessed with two daughters and a son, Paul who followed his footsteps and later took up the chair as the Chief of Pasteur Institute, Brussels. Paul, like his father, also served as the Professor of Bacteriology.

Bordet breathed his last on April 6, 1961. His ashes were interred at the Ixelles Cemetery in Brussels.

Jules Bordet was born as Jules Jean Baptiste Vincent Bordet on June 13, 1870 at Soignies, Belgium. Not much is known about his childhood, his parents and family.

Upon completing his formal studies, Bordet enrolled at the Free University of Brussels from where he received his doctorate degree in medicine in 1892.

Post completing his doctoral studies, in 1894, Bordet began his career at the Pasteur Institute in Paris. He worked at the laboratory of Elie Metchnikoff, who had then discovered phagocytosis of bacteria by white blood cells.

At the Pasteur Institute, Paris, Bordet conducted research on the destruction of bacteria and red corpuscles in blood serum. This led to the foundation of serology – a study of immune reactions in body fluids.

Bordet made a revolutionary discovery in 1895. He found that the rupture of the bacterial cell walls was caused by two components which were present in blood serum – first was a heat-stable antibody present in animals immune to bacteria and the second was a heat-sensitive substance found in all animals.

In 1898, he discovered that RBC injected from one animal species into the other gets damaged through hemolysis which is analogous to bacteriolysis.

In 1900, Bordet left Paris to set up Pasteur Institute in Brussels. It was in Brussels that Bordet reached the magnum opus of his career. Along with his brother-in-law, Octave Gengou, he continued his immunity research which led to the development of complement-fixation test that detected the presence of infectious agents in the blood. These infectious agents are the cause of major diseases like typhoid, tuberculosis, syphilis. Even today, the technique is used for serologic testing for many other diseases.

Bordet’s major work came when he shifted to Brussels from Paris and set up Pasteur Institute in Brussels. He set the foundation for the complement-fixation testing methods that enabled the development of the serological tests for syphilis. He isolated Bordetella pertussis in pure culture and determined that it was the main cause behind whooping cough.