Of special interest is the cautionary tale of the Massengill Company’s Elixir Sulfanilamide, which contained an industrial solvent and killed more than 100 people in the U.S. Hager also provides a vivid picture of Germany at the peak of its prestige in the international scientific community and of a very different country under the Nazis. The author enlivens his tale with a host of personalities, including German industrialist Carl Duisberg, head of the Bayer company Heinrich Horlein, who ran Bayer’s pharmaceutical division researcher Gerhard Domagk, whose work won him a Nobel Prize, which the Nazis would not permit him to accept and French chemist Ernest Fourneau, whose discovery of the power of sulfa on its own greatly dismayed the German makers of Prontosil. In England, doctors tried the new dye-based German wonder drug Prontosil on hospital patients in France, researchers found that sulfa alone was the effective agent and in the U.S., great quantities of sulfa-containing patent medicines were soon developed and marketed. Hager’s account opens on the battlefields of World War II, where wound infection was a gruesome killer, then moves to postwar Germany, where industrial chemists manipulating azo dye molecules discovered that the addition of sulfanilamide (sulfa) created a chemical with bacteria-fighting properties.

It banished the notion, widely held among doctors, that chemicals would never be able to cure most diseases it established the research methods for finding new drugs and it created the business model for developing them. Science-writer Hager ( Force of Nature: The Life of Linus Pauling, 1995) asserts that sulfa, which was eventually displaced as a miracle drug by penicillin, holds a unique place in the history of medical science.

This is a fascinating scientific tale with all the excitement and intrigue of a great suspense novel.The fascinating story of the world’s first antibiotic. The very concept that chemicals created in a lab could cure disease revolutionized medicine, taking it from the treatment of symptoms and discomfort to the eradication of the root cause of illness.Ī strange and colorful story, The Demon Under the Microscope illuminates the vivid characters, corporate strategy, individual idealism, careful planning, lucky breaks, cynicism, heroism, greed, hard work, and the central (though mistaken) idea that brought sulfa to the world. Sulfa changed the way new drugs were developed, approved, and sold transformed the way doctors treated patients and ushered in the era of modern medicine. Sulfa saved millions of lives-among them those of Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt Jr.-but its real effects are even more far reaching. It conquered diseases, changed laws, and single-handedly launched the era of antibiotics. In The Demon Under the Microscope, Thomas Hager chronicles the dramatic history of sulfa, the first antibiotic and the drug that shaped modern medicine.

Demon under the microscope