ABSTRACT
Though antibiosis was rst described by Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch (Landsberg, 1949), the use of the word “antibiosis” dates from the concept rst expressed, in 1889, by Vuillemin in the following terms: “one creature destroying the life of another in order to sustain its own” (Vuillemin, 1889). The era of chemotherapy started with Paul Ehrlich who found a toxic dye molecule, a “magic bullet,” that specically binds to pathogens and destroys them without affecting human cells. He further found that the dye, trypan red, was active against the trypanosome that causes African sleeping sickness. Subsequently, Ehrlich and a young Japanese scientist, Sahachiro Hata, discovered that arsphenamine was active against syphilis (Foster and Raoult, 1974).
