Gladys Hobby

Gladys Hobby brewed the first batch of penicillin tested on people, using a fermentation process much like beer making.

About Her Life

Born in Manhattan, Gladys Hobby (1910–1993) graduated from Vassar College, in Poughkeepsie, New York, in 1931 and earned her master's degree and a Ph.D. in bacteriology from Columbia University. In 1934 she joined a small research team in the university’s Department of Medicine at the College of Physicians and Surgeons, where she remained for a decade.

In 1940 two scientists working in Oxford, England, Howard Florey and Ernst Chain (see also Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin), published a paper that told of their success using penicillin, then a new experimental drug, to treat bacterial infections in laboratory mice. Among the researchers who reacted to the article was Hobby. At the time she was part of a group of scientists studying a kind of bacteria called hemolytic streptococci and the diseases they produce. Recognizing the potential use of penicillin against hemolytic streptococci, the team immediately sent for a subculture of the Penicillium notatum mold from which penicillin comes. They requested samples from Florey and Chain at Oxford as well as from a U.S. source.

When the cultures arrived, Hobby quickly set to work growing them. Soon containers filled with the fermenting mold were proliferating in the medical school—until space under a university athletic stadium was commandeered as an ideal place to grow molds. Starting with primitive methods, a colleague was able to extract small, relatively crude quantities of penicillin from Hobby’s mold broth. On 15 October 1940, less than a month after receiving the cultures, the leader of Hobby’s group, Martin H. Dawson, administered penicillin to a few patients at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital—at first to test whether it was toxic. It was not until March 1941 that it was administered in sufficient doses to show therapeutic action. Soon miraculous cures were being witnessed.

While this was going in America, Florey and Chain, were doing the same in England—their team was growing copious amounts of mold in the lab, extracting small amounts, and conducting tests. Hobby’s penicillin was the first ever to be injected in a human—three months in advance of the Oxford group—but Florey was the first to test it in humans for its therapeutic effects, not just for toxicity. But these accomplishments of the two groups were mere months apart. Everyone, not just the groups at Oxford and Columbia, was in the race to develop penicillin, a race driven by the great number of soldiers dying from infection in World War II.

The first scientific paper from Hobby’s team was presented in May 1941. The paper caused quite a stir in the popular press as well as in the scientific world. The press coverage mobilized the U.S. pharmaceutical industry and government funding soon followed. Among the pharmaceutical companies that took an interest was Pfizer, and soon the company initiated its own studies of penicillin. By the fall of 1941 Pfizer was producing enough penicillin to supplement, and by 1944 to replace, the supply manufactured by Hobby and her colleagues at Columbia.

In 1944 Hobby left Columbia University to join Pfizer, where her work on antibiotics continued. At Pfizer her research included the development of penicillin, streptomycin, Terramycin, and other antibiotics.

In 1959 she became chief of research at the Veterans Administration Hospital in East Orange, New Jersey, where she studied chronic infectious diseases. Hobby remained there until her retirement in 1977. She was the founding editor of the journal Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy, and in her later life, she became a historian of penicillin, writing Penicillin: Meeting the Challenge, which was published in 1985.

Adapted from Mary Ellen Bowden, Amy Beth Crow, and Tracy Sullivan, Pharmaceutical Achievers (Philadelphia: Chemical Heritage Foundation, 2002).

For Further Reading on the Web

The Drug That Changed the World – article by Eric Oatman in P&S, journal of the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University, vol. 21, no. 5 (Winter 2005).

The Miracle Cure – article about Hobby; part of Vassar Innovators Web site.

Gladys Hobby (1910–1993) – from the National Women’s History Museum.