THE key event in the emergence of antibiotics, says Thomas Hager, was not the introduction of penicillin in the 1940s but the discovery of sulphanilamide, a synthetic antimicrobial drug, a decade earlier. The man behind this discovery was Gerhard Domagk, who is the subject of this book. Domagk was inspired to develop 鈥渟ulpha drugs鈥� by the horrors of gas gangrene he witnessed as a medical assistant in Ukraine in 1914. That his employer was I. G. Farben, later supplier of the Nazis鈥� poison gas Zyklon B, is just one of the grim ironies in this colourfully written tale.
The Demon Under the Microscope
Harmony
