EVER WONDER by Jacque Scott: Penicillin

Penicillin

Ever think of penicillin and why it is the most important discovery of the 20th century?  It all started during World War I when a young bacteriologist named Alexander Fleming was a lieutenant in Britain’s Royal Army Medical Corps. He saw death all around him. He saw that many died from minor wounds only because of resulting infections that sent deadly bacteria throughout their bloodstreams.

Many years later, Fleming said, “ Surrounded by all those infected wounds….I was consumed by a desire to discover….something which would kill those (disease bearing) microbes.”  That desire led Fleming in research that developed penicillin, the world’s first antibiotic.  It was the first of the miracle drugs that kill off the destroying bacteria.

In the 1920’s, Fleming continued to work on his research. He cultured various strains of harmful bacteria and sought a chemical means of destroying them.

But when the first breakthrough came, it was just as much luck as it was the result of hard work.

One day in 1928, Fleming was discussing his work with a colleague when his eyes wandered to a petri dish filled with a bacteria colony.  The dish had been left open and had become contaminated with some airborne spores that had settled around the edge and formed a mold.

These molds often formed on petri dishes, but there was something unusual about this one.  He noticed that where the mold and the bacteria met, the bacteria was dying off.  He later wrote, “What had formerly been a well-developed staphylococcus colony was now but a shadow of its former self.”

In just a few short weeks, Fleming cultivated this amazing fungus and grew it in a broth. He took droplets from it calling it “mold juice.” He then tested it against different forms of deadly bacteria like staphylococcus, streptococcus, and gonococcus.  In every case the bacteria died when it came in contact with the mold juice.  But, he didn’t know what it would do to the human body.  Would people die?  He drank some of his mold juice and had no ill effects.

Eventually Fleming called his special juice “penicillin notatum” and read his research notes to his fellow researchers. They were less than impressed for some reason, and the papers ended up in a dusty old stack in a research library.

Ten years later, two other researchers, Dr Howard Florey and Dr Ennst Chain, found the musty old papers.  They believed Fleming to be dead and started conducting their own experiments with the mold penicillum notatum.  Soon all of Fleming’s claims were proved.  Although they found the mold to be unstable and produced very little antibacterial material, they were able to get just enough penicillin to test the drug on first mice and then on humans.  Both test subjects were infected with staphylococcus germs.

By then it was 1940, and Britain was at war again with Germany.  Though the new drug had the potential to save hundreds of thousands of war wounded, Britain could not afford the loss of facilities or manpower to research it further.  Florey went to the United States where Penicillin was eventually produced commercially and delivered to the battlefields.

United States drug companies were producing enough to treat seven million patients a year by 1945.  And, recognition finally came to Alexander Fleming when he, Florey, and Chain all shared the Nobel prize.     

So there you have it — the story of penicillin in a nutshell. God bless you.