Ernest Fourneau (1872–1949), Gerhard Domagk (1895–1964)
Before the 1930s, the medical world believed that only infections caused by protozoa were sensitive to chemotherapeutic agents. Penicillin was the subject of an obscure laboratory report and not yet a medicine. In 1931, Gerhard Domagk, Director of Experimental Pathology at IG Farben in Germany, initiated a screening program to discover a drug effective against a wide range of bacterial infections. The most promising of these chemicals was Prontosil, a red dye first synthesized in 1908 that was intended for use in fiber products.
Testing of Prontosil in humans and animals proved very encouraging, but Domagk withheld publishing his results for patent-protection reasons. One of the first successesful treatments involved his six-year-old daughter Hildegarde, who was experiencing life-threatening streptococcal septicemia (blood poisoning) after pricking her finger on an embroidery needle in 1935. Far more visible, and capturing the 1936 headlines in the United States, was news that Prontosil cured President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s son, Franklin Jr., who had developed near-deadly complications caused by a streptococcal throat infection.
Prontosil was ineffective against bacteria in a test tube, but when administered to animals and humans infected with the same bacteria, its antibacterial effects became evident. In 1935, scientists at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, working under the very distinguished French medicinal chemist Ernest Fourneau, showed that in living organisms the inactive Prontosil is converted to sulfanilamide, an active antibacterial drug. Realizing that the simple sulfanilamide molecule was responsible for the effects, chemists synthesized more than 5,000 derivatives; more than a score of these sulfas have proved useful in medicine.
In 1939, the Nobel Award Committee bestowed the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine upon Domagk for his discovery of the antibacterial effects of Prontosil. Unfortunately for Domagk, Hitler forbade German nationals from accepting Nobel Prizes in retaliation for the Committee awarding the 1935 Peace Prize to Carl von Ossietzky, an anti-Nazi Jewish pacifist. Thus, Domagk declined the award, but he was able to travel to Stockholm to accept the award (minus the prize money) in 1947.
SEE ALSO Salvarsan (1910), Penicillin (1928), Prontosil (1935), Sulfanilamide (1936).
A photomicrograph of Streptococcus pyogenes magnified 900x. This spherical Gram-positive bacterium is the cause of many important human diseases ranging from mild skin infections to the life-threatening blood poisoning experienced by Domagk’s daughter.