Gladys Lounsbury Hobby

Gladys Lounsbury Hobby (November 19, 1910 – July 4, 1993), born in New York City, was an American microbiologist whose research played a key role in the development and understanding of antibiotics. Her work took penicillin from a laboratory experiment to a mass-produced drug during World War II.

Life and career Hobby was born in the Washington Heights neighbourhood in New York City, one of two daughters of Theodore Y. Hobby and Flora R. Lounsbury. Her mother taught in the New York public schools system, and her father was a close associate of the philanthropist and collector, Benjamin Altman. Theodore eventually oversaw the Benjamin Altman collection in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. After attending high school in White Plains, New York,9 Hobby graduated from Vassar College in 1931 with a degree in chemistry. She earned her and Ph.D. in bacteriology from Columbia University in 1935. She wrote her doctoral thesis on the medical uses of nonpathogenic organisms. During this time, Hobby also worked for Presbyterian Hospital in New York City.

In 1959, Hobby left Pfizer to specialize in chronic infectious diseases as chief of research at the Veterans Administration Hospital in East Orange, New Jersey. There she also worked on topics including bacteriophages, bacterial variation and enzymes, streptococci, chemotherapy of infectious diseases, immunizing agents, and germ-free life. She also served as an assistant clinical research professor in public health for 18 years at Cornell University Medical College. in 1985, in which she described penicillin's journey from the laboratory to factories. She stressed the urgency of penicillin's journey and compared it to the Manhattan project in its importance to the war effort. and Viomycin, used for the treatment of tuberculosis. As a specialist in antimicrobial therapy, she was among the first to research how these drugs worked in the human body.