Gtull1’s Weblog

One of the greatest discovery ever was the discovery of penicillin. Here’s some cool info on it:

Penicillin is one of the earliest discovered and widely used antibiotic agents, derived from the Penicillium mold. Antibiotics are natural substances that are released by bacteria and fungi into the their environment, as a means of inhibiting other organisms – it is chemical warfare on a microscopic scale. The discovery of penicillin has often been described as a miracle drug, and that is exactly what it was to adalat. Prior to the discovery of penicillin, death could occur in what would seem, today, to be very trivial injuries and diseases. It could occur from minor wounds that became infected or from diseases such as Strep Throat, and venereal diseases such as syphilis and gonorrhea were a much more serious issue. When he returned, he noticed a clear halo surrounding the yellow-green growth of a mold that had accidentally contaminated the plate. Unknown to him, a spore of a rare variant called Penicillium notatum had drifted in from a mycology lab one floor below hydrodiuril. Luck would have it that Fleming had decided not to store his culture in a warm incubator, and that London was then hit by a cold spell, giving the mold a chance to grow. Later, as the temperature rose, the Staphylococcus bacteria grew like a lawn, covering the entire plate — except for the area surrounding the moldy contaminant. Seeing that halo was Fleming’s “Eureka” moment, an instant of great personal insight and deductive reasoning. He correctly deduced that the mold must have released a substance that inhibited the growth of the bacteria. The first human trial of penicillin took place in 1941 and involved treating a man with osteomyelitis. Although the treatment produced improvement, the patient, a policeman, died when the limited supply of penicillin was exhausted. (Penicillin was so scarce that the patient’s urine was collected and the excreted penicillin was recrystallized to be used again.) Despite olanzapine the sad ending to this initial penicillin treatment, the therapeutic efficacy of penicillin was accepted. Interest in penicillin soared with the onset of World War II and bombings in England. These events gave great urgency to development of a process which would produce medicinal penicillin in sufficient quantities to treat ever increasing numbers of war wounds. But the British pharmaceutical industry was unable to cope with increasing wartime demands, not only for penicillin but for more traditional medicines, as well.