HE was born in India but his karmabhoomi was America and his work universal. Dr. Yella Pragada SubbaRow, the inventor of such basic life savers as folic acid and Vitamin B lived the life of a man passionately and blindly devoted to the cause of finding cures for diseases. But his research and discoveries that laid the ground for several path breaking advances in medicine are little known outside the world of bio chemistry.
SubbaRow’s is an awe-inspiring life. He was born in 1895, a small town in Andhra Pradesh, in a rather impoverished family of a clerk in taluk office. His father retired from job early due to illness and the mother took the burden of the family of seven children. When he was merely 12, unable to see the trauma of the family’s poverty, attempted to ‘run’ away to Varanasi, where he thought he would sell bananas to visiting pilgrims and become ‘rich’ and support the siblings. He was caught while fleeing and the thrashing he got from the mother removed such thoughts from his mind for ever. His next attempt at escape was to join the Ramakrishna Mission to become a sanyasi, after his matriculation. Failing to obtain the mandatory permission from the mother, he took the advice of the sanyasins of the mutt, who suggested that he should become a doctor and serve humanity.
He entered the Madras Medical College and received a LMS certificate. His benefactor K S Narayana Murthy gave his daughter in marriage to SubbaRow. It was hardly a marriage, for, within a few years he left for America, never to return. He joined the Madras Ayurvedic College in teaching capacity and simultaneously compiled data on herbs that could help cure the tropical sprue that claimed the life of his elder brother and elephantiasis.
He left for America on a frugal scholarship for further research. He was admitted to the Harvard School of Tropical Medicine. Though a fully qualified doctor, he had to undergo further training, during which period he sustained himself on an ‘income’ of $50 dollars a month, from cleaning bedpans and urinals and acting as night porter. He secured his DTM and joined the Biochemistry Department of the Harvard Medical School. He worked on the phosphorus method here and the method he evolved, under the supervision of Dr Cyrus Hartwell Fiske is used even today in the labs. Expatriates were not treated very well in Harvard those days. Failing to get the necessary support system for his work on vitamins, he joined the Lederle Laboratories in 1940. He was 45. The lab gave him funds, facilities and young and enthusiastic scientists to work with and direct. Lederle Laboratories prospered to become a giant in the pharmaceutical industry. There is a memorial plaque in his honour at the lab even today.
SubbaRow went on from one disease to another, relentlessly searching for cures, his ultimate target being cancer. The detailed achievements of SubbaRow can be gleaned from the online cite launched recently www.ysubbarow.info. It contains six unpublished papers of the wizard. Shy and hesitant in his personal manners, SubbaRow did not push himself forward in taking credit for his achievements. Instead, he pushed the team members. He was contended to sit at the audience and applaud when the young members of his group were awarded and praised for their collective work. Some of his remarkable work include the relief for acute leukaemia, an alternative to penicillin called Aureomycin (the next generation of this cured the plague in 1994 in India), and DEC (Diethyl-carbamazine) that combated the disfiguring disease of filariasis.
Death literally stole SubbaRow from humanity. It crept in the night of 8-9 August 1948. He was only 53 and was dreaming of higher achievements and planning the future work with gusto. He remained an Indian, even after the relaxed laws offered him an opportunity to become an American citizen. In spirit too he remained Indian, contributing Gandhi Memorial Pulpit to the local community church in New York. His wife, Sheshagiri, who had long abandoned the hope of seeing her husband, outlived him by several decades. They had no children.
The only official recognition that SubbaRow has got in India is a release of stamp on him in mid 1990s and a photo album of his biography by Vigyan Prasar. S P K Gupta, a former foreign editor of Press Trust of India and biographer of SubbaRow has almost fought a lonely battle to secure the rightful honour to this ‘Wizard of Wonder Drugs.’ It is due to his efforts that the on-line link has been constructed. The archives contains some unpublished papers of SubbaRow.
