Until 1907, when the Institute was awarded the great gold medal at the International Congress of Hygiene and Demography, in Berlin, its scientific production, published in the aforementioned periodicals, resulted from the work of young researchers who had never attended another research center. Only after that event, renowned scientists such as Stanislas von Prowazek, Gustav Giemsa and Max Hartmann expressed an interest in working in the Manguinhos laboratories, staying here for a long time collaborating in studies on smallpox, cytology, antidiphtheria serum, spirochetosis, ciliates, amoebas, trichonymphs, hemogregarines and other protozoa.
The impact of the Institute's award was decisive in other respects. The project that transformed the Federal Serotherapy Institute into an "Institute of Experimental Pathology", dormant for a long time in Congress, was quickly approved and sanctioned by President Affonso Penna, as Decree n° 1812, on December 12, 1907. Government of the respective regiment, on March 19, 1908, the name "Instituto Oswaldo Cruz" was officially adopted.
Inaugurated in 1908, the Course of Application was the first Brazilian graduate school, a true innovation in the national scientific panorama. It taught and worked for two years on research and experimentation methods in microscopy, microbiology, immunology, physics and biological chemistry, and parasitology sensu lato.
This is how the Instituto Seroterapico formed a small group that quickly absorbed and expanded the scientific and technological knowledge necessary for the company's success. In possession of this knowledge, a mediocre structure would be limited to a routine productivity, of great social utility but confined to its immediate purpose. By chance, however, someone at the head of the enterprise was prepared to understand that this successful scientific and technological beginning could be expanded to encompass other fields of national pathology. With a scientific development level with the highest standards of the time, associated with the transmission of knowledge through the Application Course and the production of various prophylactic, therapeutic and diagnostic agents, already in 1909 the Instituto Oswaldo Cruz had assumed, in an inverse sequence, the tasks that today characterize the modern University: teaching, research and extension. And, in order to better ensure the dissemination of the knowledge generated in its laboratories, from 1909 onwards, it published the "Memories of the Oswaldo Cruz Institute".