Word: prontosil
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...fled Nazi Germany. Armed with funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, these scientists made it their objective to identify and isolate substances from molds that could kill bacteria. The mission was inspired by the earlier work of Gerhard Domagk, who in 1935 showed that the injection of a simple compound, Prontosil, cured systemic streptococcal infections. This breakthrough demonstrated that invading bacteria could be killed with a drug and led to a fevered search in the late 1930s for similar compounds. Fleming's Penicillium notatum became the convenient starting point for Florey's team at Oxford...
...wonder drugs"; of a heart attack; in Konigsfeld, West Germany. Domagk was research director for I. G. Farben when he found some textile dyes stopped infections in mice, successfully applied a dye to his daughter's infected finger, later isolated the active ingredient, a sulfa compound he called prontosil-an achievement that won him a 1939 Nobel Prize, which Hitler, piqued with the Nobel committee at the time, forced him to refuse...
...grew mushrooms in the family cellar, cultivated molds in his mother's fruit jars. In 1929 the famed Pasteur Institute of Paris offered Biologist Bovet a job. By 1932 news reached Paris that Germany's Gerhard Domagk had found that a dye product, prontosil could be used to kill bacteria that cause common infections. Bovet and his colleagues at the Pasteur found that prontosil was "a clumsy, complex chemical," set about breaking it down. After months of night-and-day work they found the essential germ killer in it: sulfanilamide, first of the modern wonder drugs that work...
...time the vitamin frontier was thickly settled, another frontier was being opened. In 1935 the French broke the secret of a new German drug and published it: a simple substance derived from coal tar would kill the streptococcus germs that often caused fatal infections. The drug was Prontosil; from it came sulfanilamide, first of the modern "wonder drugs" and first of a long line of sulfas. Other companies were the first to find high-powered, patentable variants like sulfamerazine, sulfadiazine, sulfathiazole and sulfaguanidine. Merck chemists got what looked like a dud: sul-faquinoxaline. Never proved safe for human...
Without any real understanding of how sulfa-drugs overcome infections, doctors have been freely using them ever since Dr. Gerhard Domagk of Germany discovered prontosil, forerunner of sulfanilamide, in 1932.* But the mystery of their effectiveness has recently been cleared up by a series of discoveries reviewed in a recent issue of the British Medical Journal...