Suryanarayana Murthy, whose daughter he later married. Education Following Gandhi's call to boycott British goods he started wearing khadi surgical dress; this incurred the displeasure of M. C. Bradfield, his surgery professor. Consequently, though he did well in his written papers, he was awarded the lesser LMS certificate and not a full MBBS degree. Subbarao tried to enter the Madras Medical Service without success. He then took up a job as Lecturer in Anatomy at Dr. Lakshmipathi's Ayurvedic College at Madras. He was fascinated by the healing powers of Ayurvedic medicines and began to engage in research to put Ayurveda on a modern footing. The promise of support from Malladi Satyalingam Naicker Charities in Kakinada, and financial assistance raised by his father-in-law, enabled Subbarao to proceed to the U.S. He arrived in Boston on 26 October 1922. Career in the United States After earning a diploma from the Harvard Medical School he joined Harvard as a junior faculty member. With Cyrus Fiske, he developed a method for the estimation of phosphorus in body fluids and tissues called the Fiske-SubbaRow Method. He also discovered the role of phosphocreatine and adenosine triphosphate (ATP) in muscular activity, which earned him an entry into biochemistry textbooks in the 1930s. He obtained his Ph.D. degree the same year. He joined Lederle Laboratories, a division of American Cyanamid (now a division of Wyeth which is owned by Pfizer), after he failed to gain a regular faculty position at Harvard. At Lederle, he developed a method to synthesize folic acid, Vitamin B9, based on work by Lucy Wills to isolate folic acid as a protective agent against anemia. After his work on folic acid and with considerable input from Dr. Sidney Farber, he developed the important anti-cancer drug methotrexate – one of the first cancer chemotherapy agents and still in widespread clinical use. Subbarao also discovered the basis for the anthelmintic diethylcarbamazine (Hetrazan), which was used by the World health Organization against filariasis. Under Subbarao, Benjamin Duggar made his discovery of the world's first tetracycline antibiotic, chlortetracycline, in 1945. Duggar identified the antibiotic as the product of an actinomycete he cultured from a soil sample collected from Sanborn Field at the University of Missouri. References Scientists from Andhra Pradesh Telugu people Madras Medical College alumni Harvard Medical School alumni Indian medical researchers Indian biotechnologists 1895 births 1948 deaths People from West Godavari district 20th-century Indian biologists 20th-century