Happy Accidents: Serendipity in Major Medical Breakthroughs in the Twentieth Century Read Online Free PDF

European nations were expanding their colonies into malaria-ridden areas of India, Southeast Asia, and Africa. Quinine, the only known cure and preventive for malaria, was commercially extracted from the bark of the South American cinchona tree. Quinine was in short supply, and its chemical structure unknown. In searching for a synthetic form, Perkin stumbled upon the first coal-tar dye, named mauve, or aniline purple.
The Origin of Ex-Lax
Spurred by Perkin's discovery, the Germans too began to synthesize dyes. One of these, with the tongue-twisting name phenolphthalein, became a worldwide medical remedy by sheer accident. At the turn of the twentieth century in Hungary, many vineyardshad been destroyed by a pestilence, and vintners turned to marketing artificial wine colored by natural dyes. Phenolphthalein, which had been used as an indicator of pH for more than thirty years, turns a purple-red color in an alkaline solution. When the Hungarian government began using phenolphthalein as an additive to identify adulterated white wines, an epidemic of diarrhea quickly broke out. This purgative action was a complete surprise, 1 and the chemical's use in the wine industry was discontinued. Subsequently, a few commercial laxatives based on phenolphthalein (Ex-Lax, Feen-A-Mint) were distributed worldwide. Preparations were sold in gum and candy forms palatable to children, and the products became as well known as aspirin. In time, the active ingredient was replaced by another laxative, senna.
    In 1918, after World War I, Germany was a depleted nation, virtually bankrupt, stripped of its colonies and thereby its textile empire. With neither the colonial sources of fibers nor the money to pay for imported wool and cotton, Germany feared that England would soon assume ascendancy in the world textile market. Germany harnessed its innovative minds and technological resources to emerge, within a decade, as the world's leading manufacturer of textiles, especially synthetic fibers. But textiles need to come in colors, and part of Germany's quest for market share in this burgeoning industry involved a search for a wide spectrum of dependable synthetic dyes.
    Originally, independent firms with names like Farbenfabriken Bayer and Farbenwerke Hoechst developed the field of synthetic textile coloring. Farben is the German word for “colors.” In 1904 Hoechst merged with Farbwerke Cassella. Bayer joined forces with BASF and AGFA (AG für Anilinfabrikation) dye works, forming a group known as the little IG ( Interessengemeinschaft, a coalition of shared interests). Bayer made a fortune in 1899 when it began marketing aspirin, the world's best-selling pain reliever, which it had made from the dyestuff intermediate salicylic acid. The gigantic conglomerate formed in 1925 that controlled all the German pharmaceutical houses, as wellas virtually all other branches of the German chemical industry, was named IG Farben. In this way, Germany's unrivaled eminence in the pharmaceutical, and particularly the “chemotherapeutic,” sector took root from developments in synthetic dyeing and staining. In 1924 the synthesis of a drug against malaria was announced, and within a few years success was achieved against several other tropical protozoal diseases, such as relapsing fever, sleeping sickness, yaws, leprosy, and filaria. But one fact engendered gloom: the utter failure of antibacterial chemotherapies over the two decades since Ehrlich's breakthrough.
    With entrepreneurial vision, IG Farben now prepared to launch a systematic search, in combination with the development of new dye products, for antibacterial drugs along the lines laid down by Ehrlich. In 1927 it appointed a thirty-two-year-old physician and bacteriologist, Gerhard Domagk, to be director of its research laboratory at Elberfeld. Under his direction a laborious process of screening new compounds was undertaken, beginning with tests of effectiveness against various microbes in culture,