Read Happy Accidents: Serendipity in Major Medical Breakthroughs in the Twentieth Century for Free Online Page A

They were amazed to find that its action was in no way related to its being a dye but rather was due to its containing sulfanilamide, which is not a dye. “From that moment on,” writes Bovet, “the patent of the German chemists would carry no more weight.” 5 French patent law recognized Prontosil as a dye and not a medicine.
    As reported in a French journal, the team's findings were presented as though they had been reached via deductive reasoning. 6 But recalling the experiences fifty-one years later in a book, Bovet clearly describes them as a fortunate happenstance. 7
    IG Farben's euphoric hopes for huge profits from the marketing of Prontosil had been shattered. 8
    Sulfanilamide's derivatives were patentable, but all these products were cheap and easy to make. They had the further advantage, over Prontosil, of not turning the patient as red as a boiled lobster. These circumstances greatly helped the new antibacterial therapy to receive widespread acceptance.
    Within two years of the publication of Domagk's paper, his cure made a splash on the other side of the Atlantic. In December 1936 twenty-two-year-old Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr., son of the president of the United States, developed a severe streptococcal tonsillitis that soon involved his sinuses. Blood-borne spread appeared imminent, and the prognosis was feared grave. But he was given sulfanilamide and made a rapid recovery. Newspaper accounts spread the miraculous potential of this new wonder drug. In America, such reports stimulated rapid growth of the pharmaceutical industry.
    A new era dawned. An individual with a severe infection need not start making funeral arrangements. For the first time in history, patients suffering from overwhelming infections could be cured without surgery, simply by taking a course of tablets or injections.
The Nazis versus the Nobelists
In October 1939 the forty-four-year-old Domagk was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. 9 In announcing their selection one month after Germany's invasion of Poland, the Nobel Committee in Sweden displayed not only its integrity but also its bravery. The National Socialist government had been hostile to the Nobel Committee since 1936 when the Peace Prize was awarded to the German radical pacifist writer Carl von Ossietzky, who had been imprisoned in 1932 for exposing German rearmament. At the time, he suffered from pulmonary tuberculosis and, following the award, he was transferred—in a public relations gesture—to a hospital, where he soon died. After this incident, the Hitler regime established a Nazi Party Prize that could be won only by a German of impeccable Aryan ancestry and decreed that acceptance of a Nobel Prize was forbidden.
Domagk sought advice from the authorities on whether it would be possible to accept the prize. Two weeks later he was arrested by the Gestapo and forced to send a letter drafted for him by the Nazi government refusing the prize. After being released from jail, he confided in his diary: “My attitude to life and its ideals had been shattered.” 10 When he was arrested a second time while traveling to Berlin for an international medical conference, he realized that he was under constant surveillance and thereafter acted cautiously to protect himself and his family. These experiences plunged him into years of depression. Only after the war, in 1947, was he able to travel to Stockholm to receive his Nobel Prize medal—but not the prize money, which had been redistributed. By this time, his breakthrough was eclipsed by a new class of drugs: antibiotics.
    T HE B REW T HAT W AS T RUE
    Once sulfanilamide was in the public domain, pharmaceutical houses undertook a frenzied search for even more effective analogs. Foremost among these was the British firm of May and Baker, a subsidiary of the French chemical firm Rhône-Poulenc. Over the best part of three years, its chemists tweaked Prontosil's formula in a wide variety of ways and tested no fewer than 692