He named the hypothetical agent as Zauberkugel,[2] and used the English translation "magic bullet" in The Harben Lectures at London.
Ehrlich had in mind Carl Maria von Weber's popular 1821 opera Der Freischütz, in which a young hunter is required to hit an impossible target in order to marry his bride.
His continued research to discover the magic bullet resulted in further knowledge of the functions of the body's immune system, and in the development of Salvarsan, the first effective drug for syphilis, in 1909.
[9]) From Behring's work, Ehrlich understood that antibodies produced in the blood could attack invading pathogens without any harmful effect on the body.
Based on his new theory, he postulated that in order to kill microbes, "wir müssen chemisch zielen lernen" ("we have to learn how to aim chemically").
Although he used the German word zauberkugel in his earlier writings, the first time he introduced the English term "magic bullet" was at a Harben Lecture in London in 1908.
[8] By 1901, with the help of Japanese microbiologist Kiyoshi Shiga, Ehrlich experimented with hundreds of dyes on mice infected with trypanosome, a protozoan parasite that causes sleeping sickness.
[7] In 1905, Fritz Schaudinn and Erich Hoffmann identified a spirochaete bacterium (Treponema pallidum) as the causative organism of syphilis.
[12] Dr. Lowell Wood famously bought an IBM Stretch computer from Lawrence Livermore Laboratories, with the hope that it would enable him to "design starships and find a magic bullet for cancer".
Critics of the Warren Commission's investigation of the John F. Kennedy assassination refer to the single-bullet theory as the "Magic Bullet Theory" for the counterintuitively complex and precise way a single bullet is proposed to have caused multiple injuries in Kennedy and Texas Governor John Connally.