Oxford’s Dunn School. Eight mice were infected with streptococcus, with
four treated with a series of penicillin injections and four untreated as
controls. By the next morning, all four of the untreated mice were dead,
while all four of the mice who received penicillin were alive and well. The
magic bullet had been derived from nature and none too soon. The
following day, the evacuation of Dunkirk began, and it didn’t take too
much imagination to consider how a war effort could be facilitated with an
antibiotic that, for the first time, was widely tolerated and highly effective.
Penicillin production would continue to be a great logistical challenge
for the Oxford team, particularly considering the lack of material support
the English enjoyed as the Nazi noose tightened around the British Isles.
By the onset of 1941, the primitive apparatus at the Dunn School had
ramped up creation of the antibiotic to levels sufficient to test on the first
human guinea pigs.
In the fall of 1940, an Oxford policeman, Albert Alexander, scratched
his face with a thorn from one of his rose bushes. Simple cleansing of the
wound proved useless, and a secondary infection with Gram-positive
bacteria developed in his face and scalp. As the English winter, with low
cast gray clouds and short days of light, dragged on, Albert’s infection
spread to his torso, arms, lungs, and left eye. Treatment with sulfa
medicines was ineffective. Abscesses with oozing pus had cropped up all
over his body, and surgery to remove his left eye was mandated. After
months of suffering, and with death imminent, Mr. Alexander became the
first person in the world to receive penicillin for an infection on February
12, 1941.
The intravenous injection of penicillin was started in the morning, with
doses given every three hours. By the next day, the patient’s face was no
longer swollen, his fever had normalized. The gush of pus almost
immediately had slowed down, leaving everyone ecstatic and the
policeman able to eat. It must have seemed like a miracle, but the sobering
reality of their production failings tempered the sense of triumph,
particularly when a second patient, a fifteen-year-old boy named Arthur
Jones, contracted a life-threatening infection after a hip operation.
Alexander had been given a five-day course of penicillin, essentially
exhausting the stockpile held by Florey and Chain; another ten days passed
with his condition remaining stable.
marcin
(Marcin)
#1