...remain obscure in this
age of instant communication?
SubbaRow was
"a poor businessman" is the answer of a
patent attorney who was astonished 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
collabo�rator, pushed by him to the limelight, took
the bow as each fruit of research directed by
SubbaRow was revealed to the public. He never granted
interviews to the press. He never made the rounds of
the academics 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. How then was he a 'glory‑hunter'? And
what was the kind of fame he was after?
SubbaRow was only thirteen when he ran
away from his poverty-stricken home in search of
wealth and fame in Varanasi with a formula for making
millions by selling bananas to pilgrims who flock the
Holy City.
Intercepted
and brought back, he was by his mother pushed
determinedly to scholastic achievements, did well in
mathematical studies and could well have won
distinc�tion as a wizard in mathematics.
But
it seemed to him that politics, medicine, high
finance and even humanitarianism as avenues to fame
were all maya, mere illusion. Even good works were to
be spurned as they brought rewards in kind. He would
join the Ramakrishna Mis�sion and become a sanyasin.
Since
he could not be admitted into the monastic order
without the permission of his mother who was keen on
worldly successes for him, the Mission which believed
in good works persuaded him to enter the medical
college so that he could serve in its clinics as a
doctor. His mother was puzzled but was reassured when
he told her: "I must win a name in the world.
Then only would life be worthwhile. If it comes to
that, one must even be prepared to do something evil
and win fame". As if to prove this, he married a
rich girl to finance his medical education although
he knew marriage and family life were not meant for
him. His new goal would have permitted him to win
fame by devoting his life to the treatment of the
sick without expectations of financial reward, but
his years in medical college convinced him that
modern medicine was then powerless against many
diseases.
He
took up a position therefore in the Madras Ayurvedic
College in the hope that he could wrest potent drugs
from Ayurveda which had rescued him from the jaws of
death a few years earlier when modern medicine had
failed him. He quickly abandoned his quest for glory
as a new synthesiser of the modern and ancient arts
of healing the sick. The Ayurvedic College was not
the place for any sustained medical research.
So
he enrolled him�self in the Harvard School of
Tropical Medicine and earned its diploma at the price
of a year of extreme personal privation. The Diploma
was of no use to him as he never intended to use it
for hanging out a doctor's shingle. But he used his
foothold in Harvard to get enrolled in the
biochemistry course of the Medical School. He made a
spectacular start in the summer of 1924 and, before
the year was out, the American Society of Biological
Chemists set its seal of approval on a valuable
laborato�ry tool he devised which is used to this
date by biochemists the world over: "a rapid
colorimetric method" for estimation of
phospho�rus in body fluids and tissues. He had worked
out the method under the supervision of Dr. Cyrus
Fiske and courtesy in research required that it bore
the names of both men and association with a
professor well established in the field would make
the method more readily accept�able to the
profession. So it was as "the
Fiske‑SubbaRow Method" that it was
presented in the biochemistry textbooks that came out
in 1925.
A
follow‑up study on the phosphorus method took
him and Fiske on a wrong trail which nevertheless led
them to "the greatest discovery" in twenty years
of a world‑wide study of phosphorus metabolism
‑ a discovery that showed the Nobel Committee
erred in awarding the 1922 prize in medicine and
physiology to Archibald Hill and Otto Meyerhof for
explaining muscular contraction in terms of the
conversion of glycogen to lactic acid.
Phosphocreatine,
and adenosine triphosphate (ATP) also discovered
subsequently by SubbaRow in Fiske's laboratory,
proved to be the sources of muscular energy
which make possible all physical activities of living
beings. The slowness of the bioche�mical
orthodoxy in accepting new ideas, the natural
reluctance of the prestigious Nobel Committee to
admit it had awarded a prize rather prematurely and
controversies over publication priorities cheated
Fiske and SubbaRow of full credit for what is
undoubtedly a key discovery in the understanding of
the riddle of life itself. SubbaRow even renounced
unhesitatingly personal credit for these discoveries
when Fiske's promotion as head of the department of
biochemistry hung in the balance in 1935. He told
Harvard authorities that his own con�tributions were
mostly technical and that the "brains behind the
work as well as the finer side of the technique"
were all entirely Fiske's.
SubbaRow
had by then a new passion and the discoveries in
muscle chemistry were for him entirely a matter of
past record. He had just achieved a breakthrough in
the concentration of the substance in liver that
helped pernicious anaemia patients. He was entirely
preoc�cupied with the isolation of this cure for a
deficiency disease then believed to be closely
related to tropical sprue which had afflicted all the
Yellapragada brothers and taken the life of one.
The
sacrifice severely handicapped him in his hunt for
vitamins in liver. Harvard authorities saw no reason
to promote from his lowly staff position one who, on
his own admission, had been no more than a pair of
extra hands for Fiske. Denied qualified assistants,
laboratory facilities and budgets that would have
gone with a faculty appoint�ment that was his due,
SubbaRow had to depend on outside help over which he
had but a modicum of control for man‑power and
ma�terial assistance, analytical work and clinical
collaboration. His bet�ter endowed rivals won glory
as discoverers of the vitamin properties of nicotinic
acid and pantothenic acid. And the final step in the
isola�tion of vitamin B12 eluded him.
SubbaRow
left Harvard for Lederle Laboratories at Pearl River,
New York State, which had a profitable business with
liver preparations based on technical know‑how
acquired from him in return for liver supplies and
large‑scale isolation facilities on weekends.
Lederle had turned to him in an effort to secure a
place in the new field of vitamins and antibiotics
which were rendering its mainline of vaccines, sera
and to�nics obsolete. This was SubbaRow's chance to
provide modem medicine with an arsenal of potent
drugs to fight disease.
In
his new laboratories nestled in picturesque Rockland
County, he gathered a group of young men fresh out of
university graduate schools and some veteran science
specialists and technicians.
After
an initial incubation period of five years, SubbaRow
and his team of young scientists and
"amateur" experts, presented, in a fabulous
three‑year period of great discoveries, to the
medical world Folic Acid, anti-folics Aminopterin and
Methotrexate the anti‑vitamins which opened up
a hopeful new line of attack on cancer, Diethyl
Carbamazine an anti‑filarial, and Aureomycin
the parent tetracycline that is a panacea for many
bacterial and some viral infections.
He
was in the Harvard tradition "the brain"
and could perhaps have claimed that the boys he had
guided and inspired were just so many
"hands". But that would have been unfair to
them as it would have been so unworthy of himself.
"The victories of science are rarely won single
handed," he insisted. "No one man should
get the credit."
SubbaRow,
looking all the time for new drugs to conquer
disease, did not pause to realise that he could be
the symbol of achievements by the research teams he
was directing in such masterly fashion, organising
them, motivating them and helping them cross hurdles
each time they were held up. His enthusiasm for
brilliant members of his research teams was now so
unbounded that he began to push into the limelight
those whose dedication most nearly matched his own:
Coy Waller, the
youngest member of his folic team, had in his opinion
made the most outstanding contribution.
Sydney Farber, while treating
leukaemia patients, switched from folic acid
conjugates to folic acid antagonists and
blazed the trail since followed by cancer fighters
all over the world.
Redginal Hewitt noticed the
antifilarial activity of a chemical among the scores
sent to him for routine screening in rats and
provid�ed thereby the lead for synthesis of Hetrazan.
Benjamin Duggar screened
thousands of moulds and supplied SubbaRow with
hundreds of microbe killers one of which yielded
Aureomycin, the world's first tetracycline
antibiotic.
While
Duggar as "discoverer" was presenting
Aureomycin at the New York Academy of Sciences,
SubbaRow was seen in the back row talking animatedly
with an assistant about engineering plans for the new
cancer research laboratory that would be built for
him at a nearby town by his company.
SubbaRow
died two weeks later, a stranger to Lady Fame whom he
had pursued all his life but to whom he never
presented his suit. His last expressed wish to
colleagues was: "If God will spare me another
couple of years, may be we can cure another
disease."
The
Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm which awards the
Nobel Prize in physiology and medicine used to have a
portrait of Subba�Row, and SubbaRow's colleagues who
saw it in the 50's speculated whether he was ever
considered for the Prize which so fascinated him
during his early years at Harvard.
Poli
Kittu, amateur Boy Scout in the Kannada play of the
same name, was ever in quest of the daily good turn
that would win re�cognition for him from the team,
never realising that his spontaneous acts of aid and
assistance to fellow humans were far worthier than
those reported to the scout‑master by his
peers.
SubbaRow
never recognised any of his many contributions to the
understanding of life processes and to the conquest
of disease as worthy of the fame he thirsted for. A
medical warrior's quest never ends so long as there
is a single illness that remains to be
conquered.
SubbaRow
is not famous, but his gifts to biochemistry and
medicine keep performing a million good turns for
mankind each day around the world.
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