Gramicidin S - History

History

Gramicidin S was discovered by Russian microbiologist Georgyi Frantsevitch Gause and his wife Maria Brazhnikova in 1942. Within the year Gramicidin S was being used in Soviet military hospitals to treat infection and eventually found usage at the front lines of combat by 1946. Gause was awarded the Stalin Prize for Medicine for his discovery in 1946. In 1944, Gramicidin S was sent by the Ministry of Health of the USSR to Great Britain via the International Red Cross in a collaborative effort to establish the exact structure. English chemist Richard Synge proved that the compound was an original antibiotic and a polypeptide using paper chromatography. He would later go on to receive the Nobel Prize for his work in chromatography. The crystal structure was finally established by Dorothy Hodgkin and Gerchardt Schmidt. The importance of Gramicidin S and antibiotic research in general was so great that Gause was not persecuted during the period of Lysenkoism in the USSR, while many of his colleagues were being executed. Indeed, it was his need for developing new strains to mass produce antibiotics that allowed politically sanctioned collaborations with geneticists like Joseph Rapoport and Alexander Malinovsky, who would both actively participate in the downfall of Lysenkoism.