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Yellapragada Subbarow: The Biochemist Behind ATP and Methotrexate

He helped discover what powers every cell in the human body. Harvard still refused him tenure — its chemistry department had never granted it to a foreign-born scientist.

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Science & Technology · SciTech0069

Yellapragada Subbarow

Biochemist behind ATP, folic acid, and methotrexate (1895–1948)

12 Jan 1895

Born in Bhimavaram, Andhra Pradesh.

1929

Co-discovers ATP’s role as the cell’s energy source, at Harvard.

May 1940

Harvard denies him tenure. He joins Lederle Laboratories instead.

8 Aug 1948

Dies, having led some of the era’s most important drug discoveries.

1929 discoveryATP (with Cyrus Fiske)

Cancer drug developedMethotrexate

1946 filariasis drugHetrazan

The Unsung Hero

Subbarow avoided publicity, rarely giving interviews or lecture tours. Despite discoveries behind ATP, folic acid, methotrexate, and Hetrazan, he remains relatively unknown outside science.

📑 Contents

1Timeline
2Must Know
3Good to Know
4Test Yourself
5Great to Know

Timeline

12 January 1895: Yellapragada Subbarow is born in Bhimavaram, Andhra Pradesh.
He trains in medicine at Madras Medical College, before moving to the United States.
He earns a diploma in tropical medicine, and a PhD in biochemistry, from Harvard.
1925: With supervisor Cyrus Fiske, he develops a new method to measure phosphorus in tissue, later called the Fiske-Subbarow method.
1929: The two co-discover ATP (adenosine triphosphate), the molecule that powers cellular energy.
May 1940: Harvard denies him tenure, after 17 years there. He joins Lederle Laboratories instead.
1946: His team develops Hetrazan, a drug for filariasis.
8 August 1948: He dies.

Must Know

Yellapragada Subbarow was a biochemist, born on 12 January 1895, in Bhimavaram, Andhra Pradesh.
At Harvard, with supervisor Cyrus Fiske, he helped discover ATP (adenosine triphosphate), in 1929 — the molecule that powers energy transfer in living cells.
In May 1940, Harvard denied him tenure. He then joined Lederle Laboratories, a pharmaceutical company.
At Lederle, his team developed methotrexate, a drug still used as a cornerstone of cancer chemotherapy today.
His team also developed Hetrazan (diethylcarbamazine), in 1946, a key drug against filariasis (elephantiasis).

Good to Know

Before Harvard, he trained in medicine at Madras Medical College, Chennai, then moved to the US for further study.
His 1925 work with Fiske, the Fiske-Subbarow method for measuring phosphorus, laid the technical groundwork for the later ATP discovery.
Harvard’s chemistry department had never granted tenure to a foreign-born scientist. Colleagues repeatedly voted against him, despite his major discoveries.
At Lederle, he also led the department where chlortetracycline, the first tetracycline antibiotic, was discovered in 1945.
He avoided public attention. He rarely gave interviews or went on lecture tours, unusual for a scientist with such significant discoveries.

Test Yourself

Great to Know

Subbarow’s Harvard tenure denial is a stark case study. His discoveries stand among the century’s most important in biochemistry, yet institutional bias openly blocked his advancement, by the department’s own admitted standard.
His drugs solved very different problems: ATP explained basic cellular energy, methotrexate targeted cancer, and Hetrazan targeted a neglected tropical disease. Few biochemists shape such a wide range of medicine.
His reluctance to publicise his own work is often cited as one reason he remains far less known than contemporaries with comparable discoveries.

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