博客來The world’s first successful antifungal drug saved millions of lives. The two women who discovered it gave away their fortune.
Elizabeth Lee Hazen was not destined for scientific fame. Orphaned young and driven by necessity, this quiet daughter of the Mississippi Delta funded her own education, earning a Ph.D. at a time when women were scarce in the laboratory. For decades, she served as a meticulous, unheralded microbiologist in the New York State public health system, yet she was the first to recognize a silent, catastrophic threat: as antibacterial drugs like penicillin swept the globe, they cleared the way for deadly, untreatable fungal infections.
This is the story of Hazen’s tenacious response. In 1949, she partnered with chemist Rachel Fuller Brown in a groundbreaking, long-distance collaboration conducted primarily through mailed soil samples. Their methodical search led to the isolation of a single, powerful organism that yielded Nystatin, the world’s first safe and effective medicine against dangerous fungal pathogens like Candida. Approx.178 pages, 32000 word count
