Who is credited with discovering penicillin

Despite their battles, they produced a series of crude penicillium-mold culture fluid extracts. During the summer of , their experiments centered on a group of 50 mice that they had infected with deadly streptococcus. Half the mice died miserable deaths from overwhelming sepsis. The others, which received penicillin injections, survived.

It was at that point that Florey realized that he had enough promising information to test the drug on people. But the problem remained: how to produce enough pure penicillin to treat people. In spite of efforts to increase the yield from the mold cultures, it took 2, liters of mold culture fluid to obtain enough pure penicillin to treat a single case of sepsis in a person. In September , an Oxford police constable, Albert Alexander, 48, provided the first test case. Alexander nicked his face working in his rose garden.

The scratch, infected with streptococci and staphylococci, spread to his eyes and scalp. Although Alexander was admitted to the Radcliffe Infirmary and treated with doses of sulfa drugs, the infection worsened and resulted in smoldering abscesses in the eye, lungs and shoulder.

After five days of injections, Alexander began to recover. But Chain and Florey did not have enough pure penicillin to eradicate the infection, and Alexander ultimately died. A laboratory technician examining flasks of penicillin culture, taken by James Jarche for Illustrated magazine in Another vital figure in the lab was a biochemist, Dr. Norman Heatley, who used every available container, bottle and bedpan to grow vats of the penicillin mold, suction off the fluid and develop ways to purify the antibiotic.

The makeshift mold factory he put together was about as far removed as one could get from the enormous fermentation tanks and sophisticated chemical engineering that characterize modern antibiotic production today. Aware that the fungus Penicillium notatum would never yield enough penicillin to treat people reliably, Florey and Heatley searched for a more productive species. Yet even that species required enhancing with mutation-causing X-rays and filtration, ultimately producing 1, times as much penicillin as the first batches from Penicillium notatum.

In the war, penicillin proved its mettle. Throughout history, the major killer in wars had been infection rather than battle injuries. This is the penicillin table in a U. From January to May in , million units of pure penicillin were manufactured.

The steps of fermentation, recovery and purification and packaging quickly yielded to the cooperative efforts of the chemical scientists and engineers working on pilot production of penicillin. On March 1, , Pfizer opened the first commercial plant for large-scale production of penicillin by submerged culture in Brooklyn, New York. Meanwhile, clinical studies in the military and civilian sectors were confirming the therapeutic promise of penicillin. The drug was shown to be effective in the treatment of a wide variety of infections, including streptococcal, staphylococcal and gonococcal infections.

The United States Army established the value of penicillin in the treatment of surgical and wound infections. Clinical studies also demonstrated its effectiveness against syphilis, and by , it was the primary treatment for this disease in the armed forces of Britain and the United States.

The increasingly obvious value of penicillin in the war effort led the War Production Board WPB in to take responsibility for increased production of the drug. The WPB investigated more than companies before selecting 21 to participate in a penicillin program under the direction of Albert Elder; in addition to Lederle, Merck, Pfizer and Squibb, Abbott Laboratories which had also been among the major producers of clinical supplies of penicillin to mid was one of the first companies to begin large-scale production.

These firms received top priority on construction materials and other supplies necessary to meet the production goals. The WPB controlled the disposition of all of the penicillin produced. One of the major goals was to have an adequate supply of the drug on hand for the proposed D-Day invasion of Europe. Feelings of wartime patriotism greatly stimulated work on penicillin in the United Kingdom and the United States. For example, Albert Elder wrote to manufacturers in "You are urged to impress upon every worker in your plant that penicillin produced today will be saving the life of someone in a few days or curing the disease of someone now incapacitated.

Put up slogans in your plant! Place notices in pay envelopes! Create an enthusiasm for the job down to the lowest worker in your plant. As publicity concerning this new "miracle drug" began to reach the public, the demand for penicillin increased. But supplies at first were limited, and priority was given to military use. Chester Keefer of Boston, Chairman of the National Research Council's Committee on Chemotherapy, had the unenviable task of rationing supplies of the drug for civilian use.

Keefer had to restrict the use of the drug to cases where other methods of treatment had failed. Part of his job was also to collect detailed clinical information about the use of the drug so that a fuller understanding of its potential and limitations could be developed. Not surprisingly, Keefer was besieged with pleas for penicillin.

A newspaper account in the New York Herald Tribune for October 17, , stated: "Many laymen - husbands, wives, parents, brothers, sisters, friends - beg Dr.

Keefer for penicillin. In every case the petitioner is told to arrange that a full dossier on the patient's condition be sent by the doctor in charge. When this is received, the decision is made on a medical, not an emotional basis. Fortunately, penicillin production began to increase dramatically by early Production of the drug in the United States jumped from 21 billion units in , to 1, billion units in , to more than 6. The American government was eventually able to remove all restrictions on its availability, and as of March 15, , penicillin was distributed through the usual channels and was available to the consumer in his or her corner pharmacy.

By , the annual production of penicillin in the United States was , billion units, and the price had dropped from twenty dollars per , units in to less than ten cents. Most British companies moved over to the deep tank fermentation production of penicillin, pioneered in the United States, after the end of the war to meet civilian needs. In the United Kingdom, penicillin first went on sale to the general public, as a prescription only drug, on June 1, In Britain, Chain and Abraham continued to work on the structure of the penicillin molecule, aided by the X-ray crystallographic work of Dorothy Hodgkin, also at Oxford.

The unique feature of the structure, which was finally established in , is the four-membered highly labile beta-lactam ring, fused to a thiazolidine ring. The co-operative efforts of American chemists, chemical engineers, microbiologists, mycologists, government agencies, and chemical and pharmaceutical manufacturers were equal to the challenge posed by Howard Florey and Norman Heatley in As Florey observed in , "too high a tribute cannot be paid to the enterprise and energy with which the American manufacturing firms tackled the large-scale production of the drug.

Had it not been for their efforts there would certainly not have been sufficient penicillin by D-Day in Normandy in to treat all severe casualties, both British and American.

The plaque commemorating the event reads:. In , at St. Mary's Hospital, London, Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin. This discovery led to the introduction of antibiotics that greatly reduced the number of deaths from infection. Howard W. Florey, at the University of Oxford working with Ernst B. Chain, Norman G. Heatley and Edward P. Abraham, successfully took penicillin from the laboratory to the clinic as a medical treatment in The discovery and development of penicillin was a milestone in twentieth century pharmaceutical chemistry.

Plaques were also given to commemorate the contributions of the U. Adapted for the internet from "The discovery and development of penicillin ," produced by the American Chemical Society and the Royal Society of Chemistry in Discovery and Development of Penicillin.

Learn more: About the Landmarks Program. Teach: Landmark Lesson Plans. Building on its experience with fermentation techniques first implemented twenty years earlier to manufacture citric acid, Pfizer succeeded in producing large quantities of penicillin using deep-tank fermentation. This year marks the 80th anniversary of the discovery of penicillin, the first naturally occurring antibiotic drug discovered and used therapeutically.

It all started with a mold that developed on a staphylococcus culture plate. Since then, the discovery of penicillin changed the course of medicine and has enabled physicians to treat formerly severe and life-threatening illnesses such as bacterial endocarditis, meningitis, pneumococcal pneumonia, gonorrhea and syphilis.

Sir Alexander Fleming, a Scottish researcher, is credited with the discovery of penicillin in At the time, Fleming was experimenting with the influenza virus in the Laboratory of the Inoculation Department at St. Often described as a careless lab technician, Fleming returned from a two-week vacation to find that a mold had developed on an accidentally contaminated staphylococcus culture plate. Upon examination of the mold, he noticed that the culture prevented the growth of staphylococci.

Even in the early experimentation stages, penicillin had no effect against gram-negative organisms but was effective against gram-positive bacteria. When I woke up just after dawn on Sept. But I guess that was exactly what I did. Though Fleming stopped studying penicillin in , his research was continued and finished by Howard Flory and Ernst Chain, researchers at University of Oxford who are credited with the development of penicillin for use as a medicine in mice. Penicillin made a difference during the first half of the 20th century.

The first patient was successfully treated for streptococcal septicemia in the United States in However, supply was limited and demand was high in the early days of penicillin.

Penicillin helped reduce the number of deaths and amputations of troops during World War II. According to records, there were only million units of penicillin available during the first five months of ; by the time World War II ended, U. To date, penicillin has become the most widely used antibiotic in the world. Fleming A. On the antibacterial action of cultures of a penicillium, with special reference to their use in the isolation of B.