Yellapragada Subbarao
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Yellapragada Subbarao (also Subbarow or Subba Row or Subba Rao) (January 12, 1895-August 9, 1948) remains in the views of many the most notable medical scientist to emerge from India. He was born in a very poor family in Bheemavaram of the Old Madras Presidency (now in Andhra Pradesh), India. He passed through a traumatic period in his schooling at Rajahmundry and could eventually matriculate in his third attempt from the Hindu High School, Madras. He passed the Intermediate Examination from the Presidency College and entered the Madras Medical College, where his education was supported by friends and Kasturi Suryanarayana Murthy, whose daughter he married later. Following Gandhiji's call to boycott British goods he started wearing khadi surgical gloves; this incurred the displeasure of M.C.Bradfield, his surgery professor. Consequently, though he did well in the written papers, he was awarded the lesser LMS certificate and not the MBBS degree.
Subba Row tried to enter the Madras Medical Service without success. He then took up a job as Lecturer in Anatomy at Dr.Lakshmipathi's Ayurvedic College at Madras. He was fascinated by the healing powers of Ayurvedic medicines and began to engage in research to put Ayurveda on a modern footing.
A chance meeting with an American doctor, who was visiting on a Rockefeller Scholarship changed his mind. The promise of support from Satyalinga Naicker Charities, Kakinada and financial assistance raised by his father-in-law, enabled Subba Row to proceed to the U.S.
He landed in Boston on October 26, 1923 and the real struggle started.
A generous person, by name Dr.Strong, came to his rescue and met his immediate expenses. His medical degree would not qualify for a scholarship or get him internship in Boston Hospitals. He made up by taking on various odd jobs.
After a diploma from the Harvard School of Tropical Medicine, he joined Harvard as a junior faculty member. Along with Cyrus Fiske, he developed a method for estimation of phosphorus in body fluids and tissues. He discovered the role of Phosphocreatine and Adenosine Triphosphate (ATP) in muscular activity. This got entry into the biochemistry textbooks in the 1930s. He got his Ph.D degree the same year.
He joined Lederle Laboratories, a division of American Cyanamid (now a division of Wyeth), as he was denied a regular faculty position at Harvard. At Lederle, he developed a method to synthesize Folic Acid, Vitamin B9. He developed the important anti-cancer drug Methotrexate, still in widespread clinical use today, and the drug Hetrazan which was used by WHO against filariasis. Under him Benjamin Duggar made his discovery of Aureomycin in 1945, the world's first tetracycline antibiotic. This discovery was made as a result of the largest distributed scientific experiment ever performed until then, when American GIs who were around the world at the end of WWII, were instructed to collect soil samples from wherever they were, and bring them back for screening at Lederle for possible anti-bacterial agents from natural soil fungae.
His colleague, George Hitchings who shared the 1988 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Gertrude Elion said: "Some of the nucleotides isolated by Subbarao had to be rediscovered years later by other workers because Fiske, apparently out of jealousy, did not let Subbarao's contributions see the light of the day".
A new fungus was named in his honor: Subbaromyces splendens by American Cynamid. Subbarao remained an alien without a green card all his life, even though he led some of World War II's medical research.
