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Top 50: Studies at Yale led to chemotherapy field
The year was 1942. The country was in the middle of World War II and two Yale pharmacologists were hired by the Department of Defense to study the effects of nitrogen gas as a therapeutic agent.
The project was top secret, and pharmacologists Alfred Gilman, Ph.D., a faculty member at the Department of Pharmacology, and Dr. Louis S. Goodman, a faculty member at the Yale School of Medicine, were studying whether mustard agents could be used to stop the growth of rapidly dividing cells such as cancer cells.
While Gilman and Goodman were able to utilize nitrogen gas in a positive way, when it was unleashed on the battlefield in World War I, it was one of the deadliest chemical weapons available.
“Nitrogen mustard had a couple of uses,” said Dr. Roy Herbst, chief of Medical Oncology at Yale Cancer Center and Smilow Cancer Hospital. “Not only for positive use, as we use it in cancer - it’s not used so much anymore - but it was used in wartime, as chemical warfare.”
Source: New Haven Register