Julius Schachter, a leading microbiologist at the University of California, San Francisco, died December 20 from COVID-19. He was 84 years old.
“For decades he was the world’s authority on chlamydial diagnostics,” Tom Lietman, the director of the Francis I. Proctor Foundation for Research in Ophthalmology at UCSF and a longtime colleague of Schachter, says in a statement to colleagues shared with The Scientist. “He was also a legend in the sexually transmitted disease world, discovering that various chlamydia species could lead to systemic disease, and running the international chlamydial meetings.”
Trachoma, a chlamydia-related eye infection and one of the world’s leading causes of blindness until the 1990s, was the focus of much of Schachter’s research. In what Lietman calls a “seminal experiment,” Schachter found in 1999 that mass distribution of the oral antibiotic azithromycin was an effective way to treat the disease at a community-wide level in places where ...
