Jörgen Lehmann

Jörgen Erik Lehmann was a Danish-Swedish physician and clinical chemist best known for his discovery in the 1940s that para-amino salicylic acid (PAS) would make an excellent orally-available tuberculosis therapy. PAS was, together with streptomycin, the first efficacious anti-microbial therapy for tuberculosis and remained in clinical use for several decades. The exclusion of him as a Nobel laureate in 1952 was highly controversial, and the discoverer of streptomycin, Selman Waksman, was the sole recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine that year. In 1941, Lehmann also developed the anti-coagulant dicumarol, which is used for the prevention of blood clots and in the treatment of deep venous thrombosis.