George Henry Falkiner Nuttall FRS (5 July 1862 – 16 December 1937) was an American-British bacteriologist who contributed much to the knowledge of parasites and of insect carriers of diseases. He made significant innovative discoveries in immunology, about life under aseptic conditions, in blood chemistry, and about diseases transmitted by arthropods, especially ticks. He carried out investigations into the distribution of Anopheline mosquitoes in England in relation to the previous prevalence of malaria there. With William Welch he identified the organism responsible for causing gas gangrene. Life Nuttall was born in San Francisco, the second of three sons and two daughters of Robert Kennedy Nuttall, a British doctor who had migrated to San Francisco in 1850, and Magdalena, daughter of John Parrott of San Francisco. In 1865 the family moved to Europe. The children were educated in England, France, Germany and Switzerland. As a result, Nuttall spoke German, French, Italian and Spanish, which was extremely useful in his later career. Nuttall returned to the United States in 1878, obtaining his M.D. degree from the University of California, Berkeley in 1884. He then travelled with some of his family to Mexico for a year. His sister Zelia became a noted archaeologist and anthropologist of early Mexican cultures. After a short period working at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore under H. Newell Martin, he went to Göttingen in 1886 working with Carl Flügge and others. His research in Göttingen included studies on mechanisms of immunity. He received his PhD in zoology in 1890. After a year travelling he returned to Baltimore, working under William H. Welch and becoming associate in hygiene in 1892. He worked on the tubercle bacillus and identified the bacillus responsible for gas gangrene, now known as Clostridium perfringens. From 1892 to 1899 Nuttall was in Germany once more, first in Göttingen, then in Berlin, where he worked at the Hygienic Institute (hygienischen Institut). In 1893 He published Hygienic Measures in Relation to Infectious Diseases, a book dealing with cleanliness, disinfection anf fumigation in medical practice. He married Paula von Oertzen-Kittendorf in 1895. Working with Hans Thierfelder he developed methods for rearing guinea pigs under aseptic conditions, with no gut bacteria. This work laid the foundation for the field of Gnotobiosis, the study of organisms with known micro-organism populations. In 1895 he designed a microscopic thermostat for maintaining biological materials under studiy at a constant temperature. This was used