The "Sulfa" Drugs.

Infectious diseases had no truly effective agents for treatment available until the 1930s, when sulfonamides were developed as the first systemic drugs effectively used to fight the major killers of the twentieth century. The first of the sulfa drugs, Prontosil, was discovered by the German physician and chemist Gerhard Domagk. In 1932 he noticed that Prontosil, a red azo dye used in the laboratories of the dye industry, cured streptococcal infections in his laboratory mice. Domagk was awarded the 1939 Nobel Prize for medicine or physiology for his research, but the Nazis forced him to decline it. Workers at the Pasteur Institute (Paris) found that the active component of the dye was sulfanilamide, and the dawn of the modern era of antibacterial chemotherapy truly began.

American Contributors.

American scientists Perrin H. Long and Eleanor A. Bliss brought Prontosil to...