Paul Ehrlich

Ehrlich, born into a Jewish family in Prussian Silesia, pioneered the idea of the 'magic bullet' — a drug that would seek out and destroy a disease-causing microbe while sparing the body. Systematically testing hundreds of arsenic compounds, he and his team found Salvarsan, the first effective treatment for syphilis, founding modern chemotherapy. He had earlier shared the 1908 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his foundational work on immunity.