Ernest Fourneau was a French medicinal chemist, who played a major role in the discovery of synthetic local anesthetic

Local anesthetic

A local anesthetic is a drug that causes reversible local anesthesia, generally for the aim of having local analgesic effect, that is, inducing absence of pain sensation, although other local senses are often affected as well...

s, as well as in the synthesis of suramin

Suramin

Suramin is a drug developed by Oskar Dressel and Richard Kothe of Bayer, Germany in 1916, and is still sold by Bayer under the brand name Germanin.According to the National Cancer Institute there are no active clinical trials...

. He authored more than two hundred scholarly works, and has been described as having "helped to establish the fundamental laws of chemotherapy that have saved so many human lives".