Elizabeth Lee Hazen

Elizabeth Lee Hazen (1885–1975) was an American microbiologist working in the laboratory of the New York State Department of Health. Her most important scientific result appeared in 1951, in a paper written with Rachel Fuller Brown titled "Fungicidin, an Antibiotic Produced by a Soil Actinomycete" in the Proceedings of the Society for Experimental Biology and Medicine.

The division of labour in that team is instructive in itself. Hazen handled the microbiology: she isolated actinomycetes from soil and screened cultures for activity against pathogenic fungi. Promising cultures went to Brown, who extracted and purified their active substances; purified fractions then returned to Hazen for biological and toxicity tests. Samples and fractions travelled by post between New York City and Albany.

The background to the problem was serious at the time. Antibacterial antibiotics worked, but the microbial imbalance that followed their use encouraged fungal infections for which no safe drug then existed. Substances active against fungi turned out to be too toxic, because a fungus and a human are eukaryotes with related cell architecture. Finding a compound selective enough was therefore a task in which most candidates fell away.

Fungicidin entered medicine as nystatin and remains in use today. Hazen and Brown described it under the new name in 1960 in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. Their story is often told mainly as one about two women in 1950s science — it is above all an example of how much persistent screening of soil yields when you know what you are looking for.

The workplace explains something too. A health department laboratory is not a basic research centre — its job is diagnostics and epidemiological surveillance. The discovery of a drug happened there alongside routine duties, from material anyone could collect, using methods available in any microbiology laboratory of the time.

One more thing is worth noticing. In both key publications Hazen appears together with Brown, and not out of courtesy. Microbiology without chemistry would have produced the observation that something works — chemistry without microbiology would have had nothing to purify. Joint authorship here describes the method rather than good manners.

What the 1951 paper showed—and what it did not yet show

The primary paper describes the discovery without the shortcut “a medicine from a fungus.” Strain 48240 came from farm soil in Fauquier County, Virginia; it belonged to Streptomyces, actinomycetes that are bacteria rather than fungi. In culture it produced two antifungal substances. The broader-spectrum intracellular fraction, “fungicidin,” was active against Candida albicans and Cryptococcus neoformans. The authors also reported toxicity of the crude preparation and results in mouse models of histoplasmosis and cryptococcosis.