Natural Products as Drugs - Biotechnology and Your Health: Pharmaceutical Applications - page 32

from 800 per 100,000 to less than 60 per 100,000. The antibiotic
streptomycin was introduced in 1944 to treat tuberculosis (TB),
caused by infection with Mycobacterium tuberculosis . Between 1945
Alexander Fleming and the Discovery of Penicillin
The story of Alexander Fleming's discovery of penicillin in 1928 is well known. Going
on vacation, he left his laboratory, where he was studying Staphylococci bacteria, but
failed to put a Petri dish containing a sample of the bacteria in the incubator. When he
returned, a mold colony, which perhaps had been blown in through an open window, was
growing on the culture plate, but the area around the mold colony was clear, indicating
that the bacteria had dissolved. The possibility that one microorganism might produce
compounds that could destroy other microorganisms was not a new idea. In 1877, French
scientist Louis Pasteur, originator of the idea that many diseases were caused by germs
(infectious agents too small to be seen with the naked eye), noticed that anthrax
bacteria would grow easily in sterile urine, but would not grow if he added what he called
a common bacterium. Other scientists had found that a sterile filtrate of the broth in
which bacteria had been grown would dissolve bacteria taken from patients with dysen-
tery (an intestinal infection). When Alexander Fleming tested extracts from cultures of the
Penicillium notatum mold in his Petri dish, he found that they were effective in killing a
number of different bacteria. However, he and his colleagues were unable to purify the
active compound he named penicillin (after the mold it came from), perhaps because they
did not have sufficient resources to purify the very small amount of the active compound
in the culture. No one seemed to think this discovery was important enough to spend
money researching until just before World War II began in 1939. Then Ernst Chain, a
German-born chemist who had emigrated to England after the Nazis came to power, and
Howard Florey, an Australian-born biologist working at Oxford University, purified a small
amount of penicillin and showed that it could treat an infection in mice that was lethal
without treatment. The amounts Chain and Florey purified were too small to be useful for
humans, but as impending war became a reality, pharmaceutical companies began to
mass-produce penicillin, first in the United States, and then in Great Britain.
By D-day in June 1944, when the United States and its Allies invaded France,
enough penicillin was being produced in the United States and Britain to treat all of the
Allied servicemen who needed it. In 1945, Fleming, Florey, and Chain were awarded the
Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their efforts.