Experiment #1: Sulfa Antibiotics -Synthesis of Sulfanilamide INTRODUCTION Many people think of the term chemotherapy as relating to specific modern drug treatments used to fight cancer. Actually, modern chemotherapy began in the early 1900’s with the work of Paul Ehrlich, a German medical doctor and researcher, who is known as the father of immunology and chemotherapy. Ehrlich hypothesized that certain dyes could selectively “stain” harmful bacteria cells without harming host cells. He referred to such compounds as “magic bullets” and coined the term chemotherapy as a general descriptor for chemical remedies targeted to selectively kill infectious cells. This definition includes all antibiotics as well as the more recently developed chemotherapeutic agents targeted to selectively kill cancer cells. Ehrlich’s pioneering work on antibiotics, led, among other remedies, to the discovery of salvarsan, an organoarsenic compound found to be highly effective for treatment of syphilis (replacing mercury which had often disastrous side effects). He was awarded the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1908. Building on Ehrlich’s early work, Gerhard Domagk, a medical doctor employed by a German dye manufacturer made a breakthrough discovery by finding that a dye known as prontosil, dosed orally, was effective in curing life threatening streptococci infections in humans. He made the discovery in a desperate, but successful attempt to save his daughter who was dying of a streptococci infection. Domagk’s discovery led to an extremely productive period of discovery in antibiotics. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1939. In 1936, a year after Domagk’s discovery of the anti-streptococcus activity of the dye prontosil, Ernest Fourneau of the Pasteur Institute in Paris discovered that prontosil breaks down in the human body to produce sulfanilamide which is the active agent that kills streptococcus bacteria. Fourneau’s discovery triggered a flurry of research on structural…