Rachel Fuller Brown

Rachel Fuller Brown and Elizabeth Lee Hazen developed the world’s first successful fungus-fighting antibiotic: nystatin.

Brown was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1898. Though her family moved to Webster Groves, Missouri, when she was in grade school, at age 12, she moved back to Springfield with her mother and brother, and she finished her early education there.

Although Brown was a bright student, her family’s finances were limited, and she might not have had the opportunity to attend college had her grandmother’s friend not offered financial support for Brown’s education. Brown enrolled at Mount Holyoke College, where she earned her bachelor’s degree in history and chemistry in 1920. For her graduate studies, Brown followed the advice of Emma Perry Carr, chair of Mount Holyoke’s chemistry department, and decided to pursue a future in chemistry. She earned her master’s degree in the subject at the University of Chicago in 1921. After taking a teaching position at a private school for girls, she then returned to her studies, earning her doctorate in chemistry and bacteriology from the University of Chicago in 1933.

With her earnings from teaching, both at the private school and as a teaching assistant in graduate school, Brown was able to repay the financial support she’d needed to fund her education. Through the rest of her life, she remained dedicated to helping more people access the kinds of educational opportunities that had been extended to her.

Before defending her doctoral dissertation, Brown joined the New York State Health Department’s Division of Laboratories and Research, where she found a faster, less expensive screening test for syphilis, identified 40 types of pneumonia and created antiserums for all of them. In 1948, she made her most groundbreaking discovery alongside Elizabeth Hazen, a specialist in fungus and bacteria.

Brown and Hazen lived many miles apart – Brown in Albany and Hazen in New York City – but they were able to overcome the distance, mailing each other mason jars of soil to culture and study different organisms. These organisms were tested in vitro for activity against two fungi: Candida albicans and Cryptococcus neoformans.

Brown tried to find specific antifungal agents from the samples Hazen sent. Once these agents were identified, Brown would mail the sample back to Hazen, who would perform further testing. After finding that many of the soil samples were toxic to animals, Brown and Hazen eventually came across a promising culture with a bacterium now known as Streptomyces noursei, which contains two antifungal substances. While one of these substances was found to be toxic to animals, the other gave positive results. With the nontoxic substance, they created a drug called “nystatin,” named for the New York State Department of Health.

Any potential development of an antifungal drug was especially impactful at this time because broad-spectrum antibiotics had been used more and more often through the beginning of the 20th century. These antibiotics were so potent that they killed a wide variety of bacteria and were so thorough that no healthy bacteria were left to keep fungi under control.

Introduced in 1954, Nystatin proved invaluable for secondary infections caused by broad-spectrum antibiotics. Today, it is used under various names, not only to treat many serious fungal infections of the skin and digestive system, but also to address Dutch Elm disease in trees and to restore artwork that has been damaged by water and mold. Earning millions in royalties as a result of their trailblazing research, Brown and Hazen donated their earnings to the Research Corporation for Scientific Advancement, which had previously assisted the co-inventors in obtaining a patent for their drug. The nonprofit used this funding to both further scientific research and establish the Brown-Hazen Research Fund.

A dedicated advocate for women scientists, Brown once wrote, “It is imperative that the average woman scientist recognize her own potentials, believe in herself, and determine to give unstintingly of herself to her chosen career.” In 1977, she established a $100,000 fund for Mount Holyoke students known as the Rachel Brown Scholarship-Fellowship Program, aimed at assisting “generations of promising young woman scientists, for which we are especially grateful.”

Brown was elected fellow of the New York Academy of Sciences in 1957, and in 1972, she earned the Rhoda Berman Award of the Medical Mycological Society of the Americas. In 1975, Brown and Hazen became the first women to receive the Chemical Pioneer Award from the American Institute of Chemists.