Nobel Prize Recipient. Gerhard Johannes Domagk, a German bacteriologist and pathologist, received international recognition after being awarded the 1939 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for, according to the Nobel Prize committee, "the discovery of the antibacterial effects of prontosil." Although the Nazi Gestapo arrested and forced him to write a letter of rejection of the Nobel Prize in 1939, in 1947, Domagk was finally able to receive his Nobel Prize, but not the monetary portion of the prize as too much time had elapsed since the award, hence the money was reverted to the Nobel Foundation. He did deliver his Nobel Lecture at the presentation ceremony in Stockholm. He received three nominations for this Nobel candidacy, but between 1951 and 1953, he received six Nobel candidacy nominations for his research in treating tuberculosis. He did not receive another award. He discovered that sulfa could be used as a drug to treat infections. This discovery impacted the medical world as now infections could be stopped before a patient became septic and died. Born the second son of a schoolmaster, his mother died in 1945 after World War II, from starvation, while being homeless in a refugee camp. He was a medical student at The University of Kiel when World War I started, causing him to leave his studies to serve in the military as a medic. After being wounded from scrap metal from an explosion in December of 1914, he was sent to the Eastern front in Russia, where he saw thousands of people dying from infections. He assisted in the operating room. Besides the communicable diseases such as cholera, typhus, and diarrheal infections, arms and legs were being amputated with gas gangrene from war wounds and third degree burns from gas warfare. Physicians were helpless as there was no cure. It was at that point, he wanted to allay infectious diseases. In 1918 he resumed his medical studies at Kiel and by 1921 he took his State Medical Examinations and graduated. He undertook laboratory research on creatin and creatinine, and later metabolic studies. His research was part physiology and part chemistry. In 1924 he became a lecturer of Pathological Anatomy at the University of Greifswold, and in 1925 was a lecturer at the University of Münster. In 1927 he wrote his post-graduate thesis, “Destroying infectious diseases through the reticuloendothelium and the development of amyloid,” which gained the attentions of other scientists and professors. During the two years between 1927and 1929, he was given a leave of absence from the University of Münster to do research in the laboratories of the I.G. Farbenindustrie, at Wuppertal. The Bayer pharmaceutical company was part of this group that had the research laboratories even after World War II. In 1929 a new research institute for pathological anatomy and bacteriology was built by the I.G. Farbenindustrie. Eventually, he became director of research in experimental pathology and bacteriology on the staff of the I.G. Farbenindustrie. It was there in 1932 he discovered a red dye named “Prontosil Rurum.” He used this substance on rats and rabbits, who had been injected with lethal doses of staphylococci and streptococci bacteria. All were cured. When his own six-year-old daughter became very ill with a streptococcal infection, he gave her in desperation a dose of Sulfonamide prontosil, and she made a complete recovery. He did not submit that in his report, and it was not until 1935 when the drug was used in clinical trials on patients. Sulphonamides or the sulfa drug was the first commercial made antibiotic and was sold under the brand name of Prontosil. He continued his research in several areas including a cure for cancer. In the early 1950s, Domagk's work on sulfonamides eventually led to the development of the antituberculosis drugs thiosemicarbazone and isoniazid, which helped to curb the epidemic of tuberculosis which swept Europe after World War II. It was this research that he was nominated for the second time for a Nobel candidacy. After retirement from the laboratory, in 1958 he became a professor at the University of Munster. Besides the Nobel Prize, he was awarded the Paul Ehrlich Gold Medal and Cameron Prize of the University of Edinburgh. In 1959 he was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society. He was among the seven Nobel Prize recipients that attended the first 1951 Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting, an annual conference reunion for Nobel Prize recipients. For thirty years, he had researched cancer, publishing numerous papers on the subject. In 1958 he published his results obtained with ethyl-eneimino quinones and their derivative Trenimon. He married and the couple had three sons and a daughter. His oldest son Götz Friedrich Domagk, became the head of the Enzyme Chemistry Department at the Center for Biochemistry at the University of Göttingen and published two textbooks. Even after his retirement and he was not able to go to the laboratory, he continued researching chemotherapy treatments for cancer at his home. He died of degenerative coronary disease. In 2006 Ekkehard Grundmann published in English the biography, “Gerhard Domagk: The First Man to Triumph Over Infectious Diseases.”