Dr. Yellapragada Subbarow

Told in English, Telugu.

Tonight I want to tell you about a man whose name you may not know, even though his work may have helped someone you love. His name was Yellapragada Subbarow, and he was a Telugu boy who grew up to become one of the great medical scientists of the world.

He was born on the twelfth of January, 1895, in Bhimavaram, in the green, watery country of the Godavari delta. Picture paddy fields, coconut palms, and canals shining in the sun. His father was Jagannatham and his mother was Venkamma, and they did not have much money.

Now, here is the first surprising thing. Little Subbarow was not a star pupil. He did not always like school. Once, he even ran away from home, and he had to be brought back. His studies did not go smoothly either. When he sat for his matriculation exam, the big school-leaving exam of those days, he did not pass the first time. He did not pass the second time either. Only on the third try did he finally pass.

Can you imagine how that felt? Everyone around you whispering that you are not clever enough. Many children would have given up. But something in Subbarow decided to keep going.

Life was hard for his family. His father died while Subbarow was still young, and his mother had to struggle to keep the family going. She wanted her son to study, and she believed in him. Subbarow went to Madras, which we now call Chennai, and studied at the Hindu High School, and later at Presidency College.

Then came the saddest time of his young life. Two of his brothers fell ill with a disease called tropical sprue. It is an illness where the body cannot take in the goodness from food, and in those days doctors had no cure for it. Subbarow watched helplessly as his brothers grew weaker, and he lost them.

It is a heavy thing for a young man to carry. But grief can do something strange and powerful inside a person. Instead of making Subbarow give up, it lit a fire in him. He thought, if only someone had known how to help them. And then he thought, maybe that someone could be me.

So he decided to become a doctor. He joined the Madras Medical College. These were the years when Mahatma Gandhi was asking Indians to wear khadi, cloth spun by hand in India, instead of foreign cloth. Subbarow was moved by this call and wore khadi. At the end of his studies he did not receive the full medical degree. He was given a lesser certificate called the LMS instead. It was unfair, but Subbarow did not let it stop him.

Around this time he married Seshagiri, and her father, Kasturi Suryanarayana Murthy, generously helped pay for Subbarow's studies. Sometimes a dream needs a whole family to hold it up.

Subbarow then worked as a teacher of anatomy, the study of the body's parts, at an Ayurvedic college in Madras. He became curious about the old Indian medicines, and he wondered how they worked inside the body. He wanted to understand the why behind everything. And he knew that to learn the newest science, he would have to travel far away.

In 1922 he crossed the ocean to America and joined the Harvard School of Tropical Medicine in Boston. Think about that. A young man from Bhimavaram, in a cold city on the other side of the world, where snow fell in winter and nobody spoke Telugu. He had very little money. To pay his way, he worked long night shifts at a hospital, doing humble jobs like cleaning and helping patients. Then in the daytime he studied. He was often tired, often lonely, and far from his mother and his wife. But he kept going, the same way he had kept going after failing that exam twice.

At Harvard he began working with a scientist named Cyrus Fiske. Together they found a clever new way to measure phosphorus in the body. Phosphorus is a substance found in our bones, our blood and our cells. Their method became known as the Fiske Subbarow method, and scientists used it for many, many years.

Then came an even bigger discovery. Have you ever wondered how your muscles get the power to run, jump, or even blink? Subbarow and Fiske studied muscles closely and found important substances that carry energy inside our cells. One was called phosphocreatine, and the other was a tiny molecule called ATP. Today every student of biology learns that ATP is like the little battery that powers every living cell. Subbarow was one of the people who helped uncover that secret.

You would think Harvard would have given him a top position after such work. But they did not. He was never made a permanent professor there. Some people believe it was because he was a foreigner. It must have hurt. Yet Subbarow did not become bitter. In 1940 he moved to a company called Lederle Laboratories, and there he became the director of research, leading a large team of scientists.

And now, his old wish from Madras came back to him. He remembered his brothers. He wanted to fight the diseases that hurt people the most.

His team worked on folic acid, a vitamin our bodies need to make healthy blood. They learned how to make it in the laboratory. Folic acid helped people with certain kinds of anaemia, and it helped patients with sprue, the very illness that had taken his brothers. How do you think he felt when he saw that? Perhaps happy and sad at the same time.

But his team did not stop there. They made substances that worked against folic acid, to slow down cells that were growing too fast. One of these was aminopterin, and then came methotrexate. A doctor named Sidney Farber used aminopterin to treat children with leukaemia, a cancer of the blood, and for the first time some of those children got better for a while. It was a doorway to the cancer medicines we have today. Methotrexate is still used by doctors all over the world.

There was more. Under Subbarow's leadership, his team developed a medicine called Hetrazan, to fight filariasis, the disease that causes terrible swelling in people's legs, a disease that troubled many villages in India. And a scientist in his team, Benjamin Duggar, discovered aureomycin, one of the first of a family of antibiotics called tetracyclines, which fight harmful germs.

So many lives saved. And yet, here is the most beautiful part. Subbarow did not chase fame. He did not like to give interviews or see his photograph in newspapers. He believed the work mattered more than the name. He was modest, and he gave credit to the people who worked beside him.

On the ninth of August, 1948, Subbarow died in his sleep in New York, of a heart attack. He was only fifty three years old. He had never gone back home to India after leaving in 1922. That is a gentle sadness to sit with for a moment. But think of how much he did in those years. Scientists even named a fungus after him, Subbaromyces splendens, so that his name lives on in the world of science.

So the next time you hear about a medicine that helps people, remember the boy from Bhimavaram. The boy who failed his exam twice and tried again. The boy who turned his sadness into a promise. The man who worked through cold nights, who was treated unfairly and still stayed kind, and who cared more about healing people than about being famous.

When you find something hard, and you feel like giving up, you can whisper his name to yourself. Yellapragada Subbarow. Can you say it with me? Yellapragada Subbarow. A Telugu hero of science.

Good night, my dear.