Emmy Klieneberger-Nobel

Emmy Klieneberger-Nobel (February 15, 1892 – September 11, 1985) was a German Jewish microbiologist and a founder of mycoplasma bacterial research. She performed most of her research at the Lister Institute in London, England, after having been expelled from Germany by the Nazis.

Education and early life Klieneberger-Nobel was born on February 15, 1892, in Frankfurt, Germany, to Sophie , a homemaker, and Abraham Adolph Klieneberger, a successful wine merchant.

Klieneberger-Nobel attended a teacher's training college and received her teaching certificate in 1911. These special cell-wall-free forms of some bacterial species, which arise under certain culture conditions, have been implicated in antibiotic resistant infections.

During World War II, limited resources caused Klieneberger-Nobel to turn her attention to collecting micrographs of important species of bacteria, including Myxobacterium, Streptomyces, and Bacillus species. Around the same time, the importance of mycoplasmas as pathogens in humans, animals, and plants was recognized. The increasing relevance of Klieneberg-Nobel's fundamental work on their morphology and growth cemented her role as one of the founders of mycoplasma microbiology. They had no children.

On her 75th birthday in 1967, she was made an honorary member of the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin.

In 1980, the Robert Koch Medal was bestowed on her by the President of the then Federal Republic of Germany, Karl Carstens, in the city of Bonn