The Discovery of Antibiotics
Version One:
Middle Ages: The use of bread with a blue mold as a means of treating wounds was a staple of folk medicine in Europe since the Middle Ages. But still, millions of soilders on the battle field, farmers in the field, women giving birth, and children at play would end up dying a miserable, feverish death from simple wound infections
Mid - late 1800's: Louis Pasteur, a French chemist and microbiologist is remembered for his remarkable breakthroughs in the causes and preventions of diseases and his experiments supported the germ theory of disease. He's best known for inventing the process that prevented people from getting sick from milk and wine that became know as "pasteurization". But he also created the first vaccines... for rabies and anthrax.
But he did NOT discover antibiotics. The Institut Pasteur in Paris becomes the first major microbiology research center.
1871: Joseph Lister experimented with penicillum for his "Aseptic Surgery". He found that it weakened microbes but then he dismissed the experiment as not being of any importance.
1875: John Tyndall publishes a paper in the Royal Society about the antibiotic properties of the Penicillium mold. But apparently nobody paid much attention.
1897: Medical student Ernest Duchesne documented the antibiotic properties of bread mold in a paper submitted to the Pasteur Institute. But he was considered too young to be taken seriously and nobody paid much attention.
1915-1927: Costa Rican scientist and medical doctor Clodomiro (Clorito) Picado Twight reports his observations about the antibiotic properties of Penicillium to the Paris Academy of Sciences. Apparently nobody paid much attention.
(In March 2000, doctors at the San Juan de Dios Hospital in San José, Costa Rica published the manuscripts of Dr. Twight proving that his experiments were done much earlier that those done by Fleming.)
1928-1929: Scottish scientist Alexander Fleming accidently discovers that the mold on his sandwich bread exuded a substance that had antibiotic properties. Since the mold's scientific name is Penicillium notatum, he called the antibiotic substance; Penicillin. But most of the medical community was not immediately impressed and it wouldn't be used as a medical treatment for several more years. But nonetheless, Fleming becomes famous as the "father" and discoverer of antibiotics.
1939: the American microbiologist René Dubos demonstrated that a soil bacterium was capable of decomposing the starchlike capsule of the pneumococcus bacterium, one of the main causes of pneumonia... one of the major causes of death in the world. Dubos then found in the soil a microbe, called Bacillus brevis, from which he obtained a product, called tyrothricin, that was highly toxic to a wide range of bacteria. Tyrothricin, a mixture of the two peptides gramicidin and tyrocidine, was also found to be toxic to red blood and reproductive cells in humans but could be used to good effect when applied as an ointment on body surfaces.
1939: Domagk, Gerhard, German chemist and pathologist. Herr Doctor Domagk is a teacher successively at the universities of Greifswald and Münster, and became (1927) director of research at the I. G. Farbenindustrie laboratory at Wuppertal. Because of a Nazi decree he was obliged to decline the 1939 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. In 1947 he received a gold medal in lieu of the prize money. The award was made for his discovery of the efficacy of prontosil, the forerunner of the sulfa drugs, in treating streptococcal infections.
1941: In England; The development of penicillin for use as a medicine is attributed to the Australian Nobel laureate Howard Walter Florey together with the German Nobel laureate Ernst Chain and the English biochemist Norman Heatley. The TOTAL amount of penicillin available for use in the clinical trial on humans at that time, was LESS THAN the amount one would receive in a single shot, today!
Early during war ll : Penicillin is acknowledged as a major medical breakthrough and the Americans figure out how to make the product in large volume. I believe the production of large volumes of penicillin was first done in the large vats of a pickle factory in Brooklyn. For more information, google the history of the Pfizer company.
There was a major effort to try to make penicillin available to all of the British, U.S., and other allies involved with fighting Germany, Japan, and Italy. But because England did not have the industrial capacity necessary for large-scale production, nor protection from bombing raids, the entire process was moved to the United States. It is for this reason primarily, that the pharmaceutical industry became so well-established in the U.S.
The Americans are the first to use penicillin on thousands of patients during the North African and Italian campaigns. There are wonderfully interesting stories about the Mafia and the black market of this new miracle drug, and how, during the occupation of Italy, so much penicillin was used to treat soilders with the "clap" (gonorrhea or syphillis) that there wasn't enough left over to treat soilders with battle wounds.
1944: Selman Waksman and Albert Schatz, American microbiologists, isolate streptomycin and a number of other antibiotics from Streptomyces griseus.
Note; some of the information above comes from Prof. John Brown of Kansas State University, who writes that "Luckily, on my death-bed suffering from measles (a virus) and from bacterial pneumonia as a child in 1944, I was allowed to have penicillin because my father was in the Army - saved my life. Thank you, Drs Fleming, Florey, and Chain for your wonderful science.
(You may wish to look at the action of this antibiotic. Please see Jim Sullivan's Cells Alive! <http://www.cellsalive.com> information and look at the effect penicillin has on a dividing bacterium: )
Copyright John C. Brown, 1995
All of the "Feature Articles," and the articles in "What the Heck is...???" and in "General Interest" were written by me, and therefore, any mistakes are mine, alone. I have tried to be as accurate as possible within the limits of providing the information in a "reader-friendly" format. Therefore, please forgive any latitude I have taken with the pure science discussed. With these caveats in mind: in keeping with the spirit of the "Web" and Internet, and the fact that this institution has been established for, and is devoted to, learning, all of the articles on these Pages are for anyone's use, as long as the use is for non-profit only, and this statement accompanies any copies.
Dr Jack Brown is a professor of molecular biosciences at Kansas State University; and has a neat web site about all kinds of interesting disease, bacterial, and viral subjects of interest. He writes for the general public in these articles...all of which begin with "What the heck is...."
His web site: http://people.ku.edu/~jbrown/bugs.html
