Yellapragada Subbarao

Yellapragada Subbarao (January 121895-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 Bhimavaram of the Old Madras Presidency, now in West Godavary Dt., Andhra Pradesh. He passed through a traumatic period in his schooling at Rajahmundry (premature death of close relations by disease) 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 later married. Following Gandhiji's call to boycott British goods he started wearing khadi surgical dress; 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 full MBBS degree.

Subbarow 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 and Malladi Charities, Kakinada and financial assistance raised by his father-in-law, enabled Subbarao to proceed to the U.S.

He arrived in Boston on October 26.

A Dr. Strong came to his rescue and met his immediate expenses. His medical degree would not qualify for a scholarship or get him an internship in Boston Hospitals. He made up by taking on various odd jobs.

After earning 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 earned an entry into the biochemistry textbooks in the 1930s. He got his Ph.D the same year.

He joined Lederle Laboratories, a division of American Cyanamid (now a division of Wyeth), after 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 Subbarao, Benjamin Duggar made his discovery of the world's first tetracycline antibiotic, Aureomycin, in 1945. This discovery was made as a result of the largest distributed scientific experiment ever performed until then, when American GIs who fought all over 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 Laboratories 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.

Part of the reason for his obscurity was that Subbarao did not "market his work" as per a patent attorney, who was astonished to find that he had not taken any of the steps that scientists everywhere consider routine for linking their name to their handiwork. He was invariably in the audience when a colleague or a collaborator, pushed by him to the limelight, took the bow as each fruit of research directed by Subbarao was revealed to the public. He never granted interviews to the press. He never made the rounds of the academies which apportion accolades among the achievers. He never went on lecture tours. He never did any of these and other things required of anyone with the least pretension to awards, honours and recognition and without which one cannot achieve glory.