His name was Yellapragada Subbarao. He was born on January 12 1895 in Bhimavaram, in present-day Andhra Pradesh. His family was poor. Several of his siblings died young from disease. He studied at Madras Medical College but his British professor deliberately gave him a lesser diploma instead of a full MBBS degree. He scraped together enough money and sailed to America in 1923. He arrived in Boston with almost nothing. To pay his fees at Harvard Medical School he worked as an attendant at a hospital, cleaning rooms and changing bedsheets at night. Colleagues called him the Indian who cleans toilets. He did not stop. At Harvard he began research with chemist Cyrus Fiske. Together they developed the Fiske-Subbarao method for measuring phosphorus in body fluids, still used in biochemistry today. He then discovered the role of phosphocreatine and adenosine triphosphate in muscular activity. That discovery entered biochemistry textbooks worldwide. It is what we now call ATP, the energy currency of every living cell. Harvard denied him a full professorship. He was a foreigner and had few friends in the right circles. His colleague Cyrus Fiske suppressed and destroyed many of his contributions out of jealousy. Years of Subbarao’s work had to be rediscovered by other scientists because Fiske would not let them be published. He joined Lederle Laboratories instead. There he developed the first method to synthesise folic acid, Vitamin B9. He showed it could treat megaloblastic anaemia and tropical sprue. He then helped develop methotrexate, one of the first chemotherapy drugs, still used today to treat cancer and rheumatoid arthritis. He led the team that discovered Aureomycin, the first tetracycline antibiotic, more powerful than penicillin, which saved hundreds of thousands of lives during and after World War II. He never became an American citizen. He lived in the United States for 25 years on a temporary visa. He applied for permanent residence and never received it. On August 8 1948 he died of cardiac arrest in New York. He was 53 years old. No citizenship. No Nobel Prize. No fame. A writer named Doron Antrim wrote this about him in 1950. “You have probably never heard of Dr. Yellapragada Subbarao. Yet because he lived, you may be alive today.” The drug that treated your anaemia. The antibiotic that fought your infection. The chemotherapy that gave someone more time. All of it traces back to a man from Bhimavaram who cleaned hospital rooms to pay his Harvard fees. India forgot him. Science did not. Follow for stories India deserves to remember.