February 17, 1961

Dr. Gladys Hobby ’31, chair of the department of infectious diseases of the Veterans Administration Hospital in East Orange, New Jersey, gave the third lecture, entitled “Twenty Years with Antibiotics,” in a plant science series. “Miss Hobby,” said The Miscellany News, “divided her lecture into an historical introduction to the field of antibiotics and a description of the steps and problems involved in the production of an antibiotic All of our major antimicrobial drugs of both biological and chemical origin were discovered within a span of twelve years. Miss Hobby was primarily influential in the discovery of two of these, terramycin and biomycin.”

In 1940, working at the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia, Dr. Hobby had developed the first doses of penicillin to be tested on humans.