Alexander Fleming, a young Scottish doctor, was horrified by the mortality of infected shrapnel wounds during World War I, so he decided to search for a new antiseptic and thus began the history of Penicillin.
Alexander Fleming. Photo: Supplied
In the summer of 1928, Alexander Fleming, a young Scottish doctor, noticed that staphylococci cultures had become contaminated with a fungus. Later, this was identified as Penicillium notatum, and the antibacterial substance it secretes was given the name of penicillin.
This discovery would not have been so momentous if many scientists had not worked to produce the new product with sufficient purity and scale to make way for the antibiotic that we all know today.
Firstly, in the laboratory of Howard Florey and Ernst Chain, the method of surface fermentation was proposed, initially in reused milk bottles and later in containers.
For the animal study and clinical trial, it was necessary to purify 500 liters of culture heat per week. This great work was carried out by a group of women, known as “the girls of the penicillin”, who were beaten 2 pounds a week.
In February 1941 the first human test was done. Policeman Albert Alexander had scratched his mouth while he was pruning some rosebushes and had developed an infection on his face and lungs. He recovered in a few days, but ended up dying because the supply of antibiotics ran out.
World War II prevented further research in Europe, so the English pharmaceutical companies gave their results to the United States Government. It was very important to produce enough penicillin for the allied troops, since the Germans already used sulfonamide.
Howard Florey brought samples of penicillin to Andrew Moyer, a researcher at the Department of Agriculture, in Illinois. In a few weeks they will be able to improve the process, mainly replacing surface cultivation with submerged fermentation.
In the United States, those with experience in submerged culture fermentations were Jasper Kane and John McKenn, who worked at Pfizer, the leading producer of citric acid in fermenters.
The war also prevented citrus from Italy, so a way was devised to synthesize citric acid with microorganisms. In a period of 6 months, and despite the limitations of the war, Pfizer fine-tuned a plant with 14 fermenters of 28,500 liters each and using increasingly larger reactors and better technology, in 5 years the production of penicillin.
For this great feat, Fleming, Florey and Chain received the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1945. At the ceremony, Fleming himself warned of the danger of generating resistance to antibiotics due to indiscriminate use.
The crystallographer Dorothy Hodgkin received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry a few years later for having determined the structure of many biomolecules, among which was that of penicillin.
During the Normandy landings, 150,000 allied soldiers landed in France. All had in their medical kit a dose of penicillin to use if they were injured.
In this way the dream that Fleming had had 25 years ago, also in France, was fulfilled. The penicillin it became a luxury product in war-torn Europe.
Unfortunately, some people today underestimate Fleming’s discovery, which they attribute to chance.
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