Penicillin remains one of the most significant medical advancements, umm, ever. Before its first use in 1940, infections from a skinned knee or a shaving cut could prove fatal. There was nothing doctors could do to fight bacteria. Until the P-bomb came along.
Alexander Fleming is credited as the one who discovered penicillin while working at St. Mary’s Hospital in London. How he got to St. Mary’s in the first place is by pure chance. His brother, already a doctor, suggested he invest his sudden inheritance in medical school. He chose to attend St. Mary’s because, earlier in his life, he had played water polo against a team from there. Later on, faced with the decision to leave St. Mary’s, he was influenced to stay by the captain of the rifle club. Fleming was a good shot, it would have been a shame to lose him.
So there he was, working in the lab studying the staphylococci bacteria. (aka: staph infection, which at the time was deadly) He was a rather messy kinda guy, and at one point came back to his lab after a long absence to find his bacteria samples ruined. There was penicillium fungus growing in his petri dishes. As he was throwing them out, he saved a couple to show a colleague, at which point he took a closer look. Where the fungi had grown, the bacteria had retreated. (cue dramatic science music)
Now, fast forward a decade through a long, slow moving process of un-exciting research. So un-exciting that the other scientists were tired of Fleming and his fungi. (apparently, he was a terribly dull lecturer who showed no passion for his work) He had managed to extract the “active ingredient” from the penicillium, which he named penicillin, but not much more. Still, had he not continued to work diligently, the medical breakthroughs would have been missed.
It was actually other researchers, first Dr. Cecil Paine, and later Dr. Howard Florey, who did the work of applying penicillin to medical testing. The first human patient, a police officer who had cut himself shaving, was a successful test… except that he died. The penicillin did stop the infection, and he did get better, but then they ran out. (they were even trying to reclaim the fungi from the man’s urine!)
Such was the problem for a few years. The medicine worked great, but they could not produce enough. Until the final random events in the story. A different sort of the penicillium fungi was found… in a grocery store… on a cantaloupe. This one produced 200 times the amount of penicillin. After some mad-science experiments with x-rays and UV light, they produced a mutation that generated 1000 times as much. That oughtta do it.
So consider that next time you’re shaving. Have you thanked a cantaloupe lately?
- Source: http://www.botany.hawaii.edu/faculty/wong/BOT135/Lect21b.htm (the loooong story)
