Alfred Zack Gilman (February 5, 1908 – January 13, 1984) was an American pharmacologist best known for pioneering early chemotherapy techniques using nitrogen mustard with his colleague, Louis S. Goodman.

"[2] He then joined of the Department of Pharmacology at the Yale School of Medicine as a postdoctoral fellow, where he and Louis S. Goodman, a young M.D., became colleagues and close friends.

[5] Still affiliated with Yale, where Dean Milton C. Winternitz had recently signed a government contract with the Office of Scientific Research and Development to investigate agents of chemical warfare, Gilman and Goodman were assigned a study of nitrogen mustard.

Interested in bone marrow depletion effects of mustard gas discovered by Edward and Helen Krumbhaar during World War I, Gilman and Goodman conducted trials on mice to research on the compounds' cytotoxic properties for white blood cells.

[5][6] In August 1942, only a few months after their initial experiments, they began trials on a patient of thoracic surgeon Gustaf Lindskog whose lymphosarcoma had not responded to radiation therapy.