Born in San Francisco of Belgian parentage, Alphonse Raymond Dochez was educated at Johns Hopkins University, where he acquired a B.A. in 1903 and an MD in 1907. He began his career as a researcher at the newly established Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research. There, working with Oswald T. Avery, the pair made notable discoveries about pneumococci, the bacteria that cause the most common type of bacterial pneumonia. In studying the blood of pneumonia patients, they found not only pneumococcus bacteria, but also specific antibodies formed in the blood to fight the bacteria and help the body recover from the disease. Dochez and Avery were then able to isolate these specific antibodies and use them to develop an antiserum that could be inoculated into patients to treat pneumonia.

When World War I interrupted this research, Dochez, now a major in the Medical Corps, worked on respiratory diseases among the...