At around the same time that Florey and Chain were working in England, a team at a division of IG Farben in Germany (later to become Bayer) led by Dr. Gerhard Domagk was exploring the properties of red chemical dyes called sulfonamides: substances derived from coal tar that did not kill bacteria but inhibited their growth. They became the basis for a group of medicines known as sulfa drugs, the first of which was marketed as prontosil. In 1933, one of Domagk’s colleagues treated a ten-month-old baby boy with an almost always fatal S. aureus infection in his blood. The boy became the first
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