College, contracted a life-threatening streptococcal throat infection.
Physicians in Boston administered the new magic bullet, saving his life,
and in the process, helped propel America into the modern age. The New
York Times trumpeted the news on its front cover, helping ignite a “sulfa
craze” across the country, even leading to patients asking their physicians
for the new wonder drug by name (a first). Even at the outset of the
antibiotic revolution, overprescribing was a temptation.
The European quest for synthetic chemotherapeutic molecules was in
full launch mode as the world tilted toward a second Great War. Chemists
were obsessed with a haphazard survey of chemicals, believing that the
new man-made particles could outsmart the bacterial enemy. While the
modern pharmaceutical industry has created, de novo, chemicals that
lower blood pressure, increase blood flow, and alter cholesterol levels, the
source of antibiotics would be from mother nature, not from the minds of
scientists. Unbeknownst to the chemists, several years before
sulfanilamide was given to a human, an accidental discovery in London
had already opened the vistas of future medical care.
Alexander Fleming was a young Scottish physician working at St.
Mary’s Hospital in London, and although he was trained as a physician and
surgeon, his talents in laboratory research had led him to an eventual
career as a bacteriologist. Small and slight, Fleming had joined the
inoculation department at St. Mary’s in 1906, soon turning his attention to
Paul Ehrlich’s Salvarsan.
Bacterial researchers have always followed the pioneering example of
Robert Koch, studying the lives and sensitivities of microbes by growing
colonies of bacteria in Petri dishes in a nurturing environment. Fleming
and his colleagues focused on important pathologic bacteria like
staphylococcus and streptococcus, culturing the bacteria and evaluating
the conditions that altered colony formation. In 1922, Fleming and a lab
assistant were cleaning up Petri dishes that had been seeded with bacterial
colonies when they noticed an odd pattern. Typically, in a Petri dish of
bacterial colonies, there is widespread, even growth of bacteria across the
dish; instead of seeing such growth, Fleming noticed that there were blank
areas of no bacterial colonies. In a victory for everyone who has suffered
from the common cold and a drippy nose, Fleming recalled that nasal
mucous from his own nose had dripped onto the culture dish days earlier,
and he rapidly surmised that his own nasal drippings had somehow
marcin
(Marcin)
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