SUNDAY, DAY 7
MEDICAL MILESTONES
The discovery of the world’s first and best-known “miracle drug” happened quite by accident, thanks to the messy laboratory and quick thinking of Alexander Fleming.
A military physician during World War I, Fleming (1881–1955) witnessed firsthand the terrifying toll bacterial infections took on British troops. He began looking for an effective treatment after the war ended in 1918. In his experiments at St. Mary’s Hospital in London, Fleming first discovered a naturally occurring chemical called lysozyme. The enzyme is produced in the body and is present in some fluids, including teardrops. However, Fleming determined that while the substance kills bacteria, it is too weak to treat serious infections. He continued his investigations.
Then in 1928 he stumbled upon an interesting discovery while cleaning up his lab. He saw that mold was growing in a petri dish where he had been cultivating staph bacteria, and the mold actually seemed to have killed the bacteria around it. He examined the mold and found that it was from the Penicillium genus. He presented his findings the next year, but they received little interest and his work was largely forgotten for several years.
In 1935, however, cancer researchers at Oxford University happened across Fleming’s old articles about lysozyme and Penicillium. They began experimenting with penicillin, injecting it into live mice with bacterial infections. When those results were promising, they tried the injections on human subjects. A policeman who was near death after a scratch had become infected showed great improvement when he was treated with penicillin. But supply was short, and when the researchers ran out in a few days, the policeman got sick again and died. They quickly realized the need for mass production.
By this time, England had entered World War II, and resources for drug production were tight. The researchers turned to the United States, where they received funding from the Rockefeller Foundation and located a production facility in Peoria, Illinois. When the United States joined the war as well in 1941, the government pressed private chemical companies to begin producing the drug, which was still extremely scarce in the early stages of the conflict. These efforts had a major impact; by the end of the war, the US was producing 650 billion units of penicillin every month.