Who is the father of chemotherapy?

Paul Ehrlich was born on March 14, 1854, at Strzelin, Poland and died on August 20 1915 at Bad Homburg, Germany.

He was a Nobel Prize-winning German physician and scientist who worked in the fields of hematology, immunology, and antimicrobial chemotherapy. Among his foremost achievements were finding a cure for syphilis in 1909 and inventing the precursor technique to Gram staining bacteria.

Early in his career, Ehrlich began to develop a chemical structure theory to explain the immune response. He saw toxins and antitoxins as chemical substances at a time when little was known about their exact nature.

Serum therapy was for Ehrlich the ideal method of contending with infectious diseases. In those cases, however, in which effective sera could not be discovered, Ehrlich would turn to synthesizing new chemicals, informed by his theory that the effectiveness of a therapeutic agent depended on its side chains. These “chemotherapies” were to be the new magic bullets.