Plot

True story of the doctor who considered it was not immoral to search for a drug that would cure syphillis.

Dr. Paul Ehrlich was the German physician who developed the first synthetic antimicrobial drug, 606 or Salvarsan. The film describes how Ehrlich first became interested in the properties of the then-new synthetic dyes and had an intuition that they could be useful in the diagnosis of bacterial diseases. After this work met with success, Ehrlich proposed that synthetic compounds could be made to selectively target and destroy disease causing microorganisms. He called such a drug a "magic bullet". The film describes how in 1908, after 606 attempts, he succeeded.—Anonymous

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Dr. Max Erlich makes several valuable contributions to medical science. His first is the ability to stain specific elements on a laboratory slide, such as tuberculosis. The second was the ability to develop a serum to fight diseases such as typhoid by slowly building up natural immunities to the disease. From these successes, Erlich moved on to using chemicals as a cure for disease. The idea was quite radical at the time as chemotherapy simply did not exist. His success at finding a cure for syphilis proves his ideas to be correct but he is forced to defend them in court when he sues a colleague for libel.—garykmcd