Seymour Herbert Hutner (1911–2003) was a microbiologist specializing in the nutritional biochemistry of protists (protozoa and algae).
[citation needed] In 1936 he published a paper showing that the photosynthetic flagellate Euglena had a nutritional requirement for a substance extracted from animal tissue.
Initially this was based in Massachusetts, near M.I.T., but then it moved to a building on East 43rd Street in New York City, where Hutner was joined by a newly arrived Italian scientist, Luigi Provasoli, who had spent time in the laboratory of Andre Lwoff in Paris.
[3] With his colleague Luigi Provasoli he showed that photosynthetic organisms could be ‘bleached’ by the antibiotic streptomycin – an early clue of the endosymbiotic hypothesis about the origin of chloroplasts from a prokaryotic ancestor.
Under the leadership of Hutner's student, Cyrus Bacchi, the former led to development of the antiparasitic drug eflornithine (alpha-difluoromethylornithine),[9] widely used today against African sleeping sickness (trypanosomiasis).