Elizabeth Lee Hazen

Elizabeth Lee Hazen and Rachel Fuller Brown created the first useful antifungal antibiotic, nystatin, through a long-distance scientific collaboration. As researchers for the New York State Department of Health, Hazen in New York City and Brown in Albany shared tests and samples through the U.S. mail.

Born in Rich, Mississippi, in 1885, Hazen lost both her parents by the age of 3 and was raised by relatives. Growing up, she attended a one-room, one-teacher public school. She was an excellent student and she loved to read.

In 1905, Hazen enrolled at the Mississippi Industrial Institute and College (later named the Mississippi University for Women) in Columbus, where she discovered her passion for science and physiology. After earning her bachelor’s degree in 1910, she began teaching high school physics and biology in Jackson, Mississippi. In addition to teaching, she continued her education by enrolling in summer studies at the University of Tennessee and the University of Virginia.

Hazen later moved to New York to pursue graduate school at Columbia University. She earned her master’s degree in biology in 1917 and then entered a program in medical bacteriology at Columbia’s College of Physicians and Surgeons. Pausing her education, she served as an Army diagnostic laboratory technician in Alabama and New York during World War I and then became assistant director of the clinical laboratory of a hospital in West Virginia. In 1923, she returned to Columbia, where she was one of the university’s first women doctoral students. Hazen earned her doctorate in microbiology in 1927.

After taking on clinical and teaching positions at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital and at the College of Physicians and Surgeons, in 1931, Hazen arrived at the New York State Department of Health. Here, she accepted a leadership role in the Bacterial Diagnosis Laboratory in New York City in 1931. Her outstanding job performance earned her many opportunities to supervise the examination of numerous medical conditions, but in 1944, she was offered an assignment that would change medicine forever.

Hazen was tasked with leading an investigation into fungi and their relation to bacteria and other microbes. While returning to Columbia’s College of Physicians and Surgeons to study mycology, at the Department of Health, she established a collection of disease-causing fungi which was used for identifying microorganisms in specimens submitted by physicians across New York.

Using a soil sample technique that had been established by biochemist, microbiologist and National Inventors Hall of Fame^® Inductee Selman Waksman, Hazen had identified new antifungal agents among the actinomycetes, filamentous bacteria, by 1948. To continue this investigation, the head of the division, Gilbert Dalldorf, chose one of his Albany chemists, Rachel Fuller Brown, to assist in Hazen’s research.

Relying on the efficiency of the U.S. Post Office, Hazen in New York City and Brown in Albany were able to exchange soil samples and information. In her laboratory, Hazen cultured organisms found in the soil samples and tested them in vitro for activity against two fungi: Candida albicans and Cryptococcus neoformans. Whenever she found such activity, she would then mail that culture to Brown in a jar.

Through this process, Hazen initially found that each agent that killed the test fungi was in turn highly toxic to animals. However, she eventually discovered that soil from the garden of her friend, Walter B. Nourse, provided a promising culture. She named the agent “Streptomyces noursei” after Nourse.

The antibiotic they developed from this important discovery was named "nystatin" for the New York State Department of Health. Introduced in practical form in 1954 following Food and Drug Administration approval and patented in 1957, nystatin not only cured many severe fungal infections of the skin and digestive system, but it also could be combined with antibacterial drugs to balance their effects. In addition to treating conditions associated with AIDS or those healing from burns or receiving organ transplants or chemotherapy, uses for nystatin have been as varied as treating Dutch elm disease and rescuing water-damaged works of art from molds.

E.R. Squibb bought the rights to the nystatin patent, and Hazen and Brown donated their royalties, more than $13 million, to academic science through the nonprofit Research Corp. The Brown-Hazen Research Fund provided grants to researchers in the life sciences through the life of the patent. For their pioneering research in antifungal medicine, they received awards including the Squibb Award in Chemotherapy in 1955 and the Distinguished Service Award from the New York State Department of Health in 1968. In 1975, Hazen and Brown became the first women to receive the Chemical Pioneer Award of the American Institute of Chemists.