He was obsessed to find the cure for the infections, and he found the right place and team in Bayer. Gerhard Domagk was a former German soldier in WWI who turned out being a physician after he saw how war (and war-related infections) took a lot of his compatriots. Human had looked for the remedy of infections for a very long time, yet the insight of this ‘magic’ remedy was achieved through a team of scientists in Bayer pharmaceutical industry, Germany. Alas, almost all of sulfa’s inventors suffered from tragic fate during WWII, despite the fact that they were the most meritorious people who ‘saved’ a lot of people during WWII.Īnd in this blog, I want to go into a more detail story about this sulfa drugs. And thanks to sulfa that the FDA gained its position as the ‘powerful’ drug regulatory agency nowadays. Sulfa is also the drug that underlies the principle of pharmacology and toxicity tests before a drug can be launched to the market.

Sulfa-class drugs were the first antibiotic (even before the famous penicillin) widely used to treat various infections, from the infection of childbirth (which could kill more than 50% of mothers giving birth during its epidemic) to the war-related infections during WWII. I think this book should be a mandatory reading for anyone interested in medical and drug development, as this sulfa drugs were the first drug that confirmed the possibility of a ‘magic bullet’ (specific drug) for a disease (in this case, infection). Harmony, 2006, 340 p., hardcover, $24.95.Thomas Hager wrote the biography of sulfa drugs in a novelette-like story, which is amazing! There are inspirations and tragic stories in the way of searching the cure for infections, the great maladies haunting human lives for centuries. Hager describes how chemists subsequently refined sulfa drugs to fight other types of infection and how this class of drugs changed medicine. While there, he experimented with dyes as antibiotics and discovered that a dye component, sulfanilamide, killed strep and tuberculosis bacteria. His studies led to his eventual employment in the mid-1930s at the then-new pharmaceutical company Bayer, a subsidiary of the German company I.G.

The saga begins with Gerhard Domagk, who as a field physician for the German army in World War I witnessed soldiers' deaths and then dedicated his life to finding a way to protect other soldiers against the ravages of bacteria. Hager, a science and medical writer, tells the compelling story of the discovery of this lifesaving treatment. They found it during World War II in the form of sulfa drugs, precursors to modern antibiotics. Retrieved from Ī century ago, physicians sought a way to overcome their helplessness against often-deadly infections. APA style: The Demon Under the Microscope.The Demon Under the Microscope.' Retrieved from MLA style: 'The Demon Under the Microscope.' The Free Library.

Demon under the microscope