Paul Rufus Burkholder (February 1, 1903—August 11, 1972) was born and raised in the farming community of Orrstown, in central Pennsylvania, in a religious family. While attending Dickinson College he decided to become a botanist. After obtaining his PhD from Cornell in 1929 he pursued aquatic biology studies in upstate New York. A prolific researcher, he held positions at Harvard, Columbia,  Connecticut College, the University of Missouri, and Yale, where he discovered chloramphenicol, a powerful antibiotic used against scrub typhus. While at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden he continued to work on organisms that could produce anti-cancer drugs. He returned to Columbia and to marine biology, which he also studied at the University of Puerto Rico, his last post.