Discovery of Penicillin
One of the most important, amazing and useful discovery of mankind is the discovery of penicillin.
The British scientist Alexander Fleming discovered it accidentally in 1928. It was shortly after the carnage of the First World War when he conducted experiments with bacteria.
One day while going on with his experiment, a tear from his eye fell into the culture plate and later he noticed that a substance in his tear killed the bacteria. He noted the incident, but didn’t know what to do with it. However, some years later, a similar coincidence occurred. Fleming left his laboratory for the holidays, inadvertently leaving a discarded culture plate lying out on his bench. He simply forgot to clean and disinfect the dish. A bit of mold had fallen into the dish containing the bacteria, forming a clear patch. When he returned, he recognized the possibility of what had happened. He decided that the mold had created some kind of chemical antibiotic, which he named penicillin, after the Penicillium mold that produced it. But Fleming could not extract the bacteria-killing substance, so he moved on to other research.
It is important to note that before the discovery of penicillin, infections were as feared as cancer is today. Imagine living in any generation over the past 6,000 years and facing the dangers of infection. For example, if you pricked your finger on a thorn, or a sewing needle, or stepped on a nail, you could be in big trouble. Your glands could swell up and require lancing, or a surgeon might have to amputate your arm or leg to save your life. This was the story of humanity for six thousand years. And infection was possible at any age. Imagine how many hundreds of millions of needless deaths have plagued mankind over the centuries.
The scientific aspects of the discovery of penicillin were left for another scientist to develop a decade later. He was the Australian scientist, Howard Florey, who felt that no one person contained the knowledge and experience to make major discoveries in the field of medicine. He had the foresight to organize a team of specialists at Oxford University in the 1930s. One member of his team, Ernst Chain, found an article about Alexander Fleming’s work while flipping through a medical journal, and this prompted them to begin a careful investigation of the anti-bacterial properties in mold — the stuff Fleming had called “penicillin.”
Individual members of the group concentrated attention on various areas of their fields of expertise, meeting periodically to exchange ideas. Chain worked with Edward Abraham on purifying penicillin. Norman Heatley improvised methods for extracting penicillin, using ether. They grew the cultures of mold in hospital bedpans. The liquid was drained and filtered through parachute silk.
A. D. Gardner and Jena Orr-Ewing studied how penicillin reacted with other organisms. Howard Florey and Margaret Jennings observed the impact of penicillin on animals. Ethel Florey later worked with her husband on clinical trials.
On May 25, 1940, the team performed one of the most important medical experiments in history. They injected eight mice with a lethal dose of streptococci bacteria. Four of the mice were treated with penicillin, while the other four were used as controls. By the next day, the treated mice had recovered and the untreated mice were dead. To say that Florey’s team was excited, is a decided understatement. World War II was raging and soldiers were dying needlessly. As quickly as he could, Florey set about to test the drug on humans.
They knew that they had to find a way to mass-produce the drug before it could be widely used and British companies were unable to help because of the war. If they had patented their formula, the entire team could have become very wealthy. But in those days, Howard Florey felt that it was unethical to patent their medical discovery. He and Norman Heatley decided to take a dangerous flight to the United States in a blacked-out plane across the Atlantic and explain his method to drug companies in the United States.
A Department of Agriculture laboratory just happened to be looking for a new use for a thick liquid — the by-product from a corn-milling process. When this liquid was used to grow mold, they were able to extract ten times the amount of penicillin. Mary Hunt, known as Moldy Mary because of her enthusiasm in finding new sources of mold, discovered that growing mold in cantaloupe was twice again as successful in producing penicillin.
By late 1943, only four years after the first mouse experiment, and in spite of the war, mass production of the drug was underway. By the end of the war, many companies were producing the drug, including Merck, Squibb and Pfizer.
In 1943, Howard Florey took a supply of penicillin to treat wounded troops in North Africa. Instead of amputating wounded limbs, he suggested the wounds be cleaned, sewn up and treated with penicillin. It appeared to be an absolute miracle! For the first time in human history, medical science had been revolutionized. Since that time, untold millions of lives have been saved from otherwise certain death.
RSS
