As a first blog post I wanted to share some interesting history about one of the common medicines almost everyone knows. Penicillin! This antibiotic has a very interesting history, and has since its discovery saved thousands of lives.
Alexander Flemming is atributed with the discovery of penicillin mold (Penicillium notatum) in 1928. He left a Staphyloccus culture on his work bench during his holiday, and found it had been contaminated with mold, that prevented the bacteria from growing. Fleming went on to perform many more experiments using the mould and named the substance produced by it ‘penicillin’. He never successfulled extracted or purifyed the substance, and in 1931 he stopped studying it.
Two researchers at the University of Oxford, Sir Howard Florey and Sir Ernst Boris Chain, while planning a research project on natural bacterial killing substances, unearthed Fleming’s papers from 10 years earlier. They, along with Norman Heatley, a young biochemist, found a way to produce a series of solutions containing crude penicillin.
The first patient to be tested with penicillin was a 48-year-old Oxford police constable in September 1940 called Albert Alexander.After five days of injections, Alexander began to recover, but unfortunately, the penicillin supplies ran out before the infection could be completely treated, and without the antibiotic Alexander’s condition reduced again and he sadly died.
In 1943, a bacteriologist working at a laboratory in Peoria, Illinois discovered a golden mould growing on a cantaloupe melon. This was a different mould from the Penicillium family called Penicillium Chrysogenum. A series of experiments were carried out on the mould, and it was discovered that if it was exposed to X-rays, a mutant strain was generated that could produce 1000 times more penicillin than Penicillium notatum.
By the end of 1943, large amounts of pure penicillin were being produced on a monthly basis. The impact on the war was huge. For the first time in history, infection was not the biggest cause of death in a war. By the end of the second world war, mass production of the antibiotic was occurring in several labs in both the U.S.A and the U.K., and penicillin was then being produced around the world and has continued to save lives everywhere.
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