Gerhard Domagk

Gerhard Johannes Paul Domagk (1895-1964) was a German pathologist and bacteriologist whose research at the IG Farben laboratories led to the discovery of the first commercially available antibacterial drug. Testing chemical dye compounds for therapeutic activity, he identified sulfonamidochrysoidine, marketed as Prontosil, as an effective treatment against streptococcal and other bacterial infections. Its efficacy became personally vivid to him in 1935 when he used the still-experimental drug to save his own daughter's arm, and likely her life, after she contracted a severe streptococcal infection. For this discovery he was awarded the 1939 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, though Nazi Germany's government forbade him from accepting it at the time; he only formally received the Nobel diploma and lecture after the Second World War, in 1947. Domagk's work opened the era of antibacterial chemotherapy that preceded the wider adoption of penicillin.