Lloyd Hillyard Conover (June 13, 1923 – March 11, 2017) was an American chemist and the inventor of tetracycline.
He then joined the Navy, serving three years in the Pacific on an amphibious landing ship,[3] ultimately rising to the rank of lieutenant junior grade.
He was part of a team exploring the molecular architecture of the broad-spectrum antibiotics Terramycin and Aureomycin.
Specifically, he was able to produce tetracycline by dechlorinating Aureomycin by catalytic reduction, that is, by substituting hydrogen for chlorine in chlortetracycline.
[8] Within three years, tetracycline became the most prescribed broad spectrum antibiotic in the U.S. During this time, the patent was challenged.