Félix Mesnil

Félix Étienne Pierre Mesnil (Omonville-la-Petite, La Manche Department, 12 December 1868 - February 15, 1938, Paris ) was a French zoologist, biologist, botanist, mycologist and algologist.

He worked in Pasteur Institute from 1892 first as an add-coach after being a student of Alfred Giard and a classmate of Maurice Caullery and was secretary of Louis Pasteur and at the same time, he began studies on compared cellular immunity, physiology and pathology in the laboratory of Ilya Ilyich Metchnikov (1845–1916).

He founded the Pasteur Institute Bulletin with Gabriel Bertrand (1867–1962), Alexandre Besredka (1870–1940), Amédée Borrel (1867–1936), Camille Delezenne (1868–1932) and A. Marie (1835–1888).

Member of the French Commission on sleeping sickness, he worked for the organisation of the mission in French Equatorial Africa.

He also worked for the creation of the Société de pathologie exotique for which he became secretary, then president.

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). He temporarily named it P. donovani and Sir Ronald Ross (1857–1932) proposed the Leishmania genus name for it.

In 1920, he and Émile Roubaud achieved the first experimental infection of chimpanzees with Plasmodium vivax.^[1]

• In 1908, he is assistant director at the École pratique des hautes études.
• In 1910, he is professor at the Pasteur Institute.
• In 1913, he is vice-president of the Société de biologie.
• In 1920, he is a member of the Comité consultatif de l'enseignement de médecine vétérinaire coloniale.
• In 1921, he is of member of the French Academy of Sciences.
• In 1922, he is a founding member of the Académie des sciences coloniales.
• In 1926, he is president of the Société zoologique de France.
• In 1931, he is one of the free members of the Académie de médecine.

See also

• History of malaria

References

1. ^ Mesnil F, Roubaud E (1920). "Essais d'inoculation du paludisme au chimpanzé". Ann Inst Pasteur, Paris 34: 466–480. 

External links

• Félix Mesnil on www.pasteur.fr (Engllish)

Persondata
Name	Mesnil, Felix
Alternative names
Short description	zoologist, biologist
Date of birth	12 December 1868
Place of birth	Omonville-la-Petite, France
Date of death	February 15, 1938
Place of death	Paris, France