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Discovery of Penicillin
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Protection against many diseases including cholera, meningitis and
typhoid is something we, in today’s modern world, have come to take
for granted. As with many other things in our lives, people paid
with human lives before a protection against diseases could be
discovered, devised and made commercially available for the masses.
The story of penicillin is one such. It is a shocking truth that
more people died from disease and epidemic than from a gunshot
during the First World War.
The story of penicillin did not begin
with the Scottish scientist Alexander Fleming. It began thirty
years earlier, in 1896, with a French medical student. Ernest
Duchesne was the first to stumble upon a mould that apparently
killed bacteria. Unfortunately, the discovery did not have much
impact and it was left to Alexander Fleming to take up the
issue. Fleming’s discovery was quite by accident. |
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It happened like this. In the autumn of 1928, Alexander Fleming
(1881-1955) returned from a four-week holiday to continue his
research work at a laboratory in St. Mary’s Hospital in London.
The first thing that he noticed was that, during his absence,
the lid of a culture plate containing staphylococcus bacteria, a
bacteria that caused several diseases right from simple boils to
pneumonia, had been peeled off and in its place there stood a
number of yeasts and moulds. The plate had been contaminated by
the yeasts and moulds.
Quickly Fleming zeroed in on the fact
that one of the moulds, which went by the name penicillium
notatum, had killed the staphylococcus bacteria in the area of
the plate where it had infiltrated. Excited by this
conclusion, Fleming continued his investigations. He soon
realized that the reason for the staphylococcus bacteria being
killed was the presence of an active ingredient. He named the
ingredient penicillin, after the mould.
However, Fleming’s penicillin proved to be
unstable and difficult to be purified. In 1940, two chemists, Ernst
B. Chain and Howard Florey, successfully isolated penicillin at a
laboratory in Oxford University in England. They demonstrated its
anti-bacterial action. They said that it could be administered by
mouth, injection or applied directly to wounds in powder form. |
Alexander Fleming |
In late 1941, a wide-scale collaboration for mass-production of
penicillin began. By 1944, manufacturers were able to make enough
penicillin to treat all the Allied soldiers wounded in the June 6
D-Day invasion of Europe during World War II.
All the three scientists, Fleming, Chain and Florey, were awarded
the Nobel Prize in 1945 for the discovery of penicillin. Of his
discovery Fleming has said, “There are thousands of different moulds
and thousands of bacteria and that chance that put the mould in the
right place at the right time was like winning the Irish sweep.”
Whatever it was, the development of penicillin and the huge range of
antibiotics that followed may have had a more profound effect on the
health of humanity than any other in medical history. Within a very
short period of time, many diseases became treatable. The
development of antibiotics gave people an enormously effective
shield against diseases. |
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