Paul Ehrlich discovers Salvarsan, the first modern chemotherapy

The German physician Paul Ehrlich had the idea of a 'magic bullet', a chemical that would kill disease-causing microbes without harming the patient. After testing hundreds of arsenic compounds, his Japanese colleague Sahachiro Hata found in 1909 that compound number 606 cured syphilis in infected rabbits. Marketed in 1910 as Salvarsan by the company Hoechst, it was the first effective drug against syphilis, then a feared and widespread disease, and the first synthetic antimicrobial agent. It was toxic and hard to use, but it remained the standard treatment until penicillin in the 1940s. Ehrlich had won the Nobel Prize in 1908 for his work on immunity.

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