Word: actinomycin
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Microbiologist Selman Waksman announced that German scientists have taken the sting from his drug, actinomycin, turned it into a potential weapon against: 1. Polio...
...first antibiotic ever isolated by Nobel Prizewinner Selman Waksman was actinomycin. And just as Dr. Waksman hoped, the drug made strong medicine. It killed many man-killing microbes; unfortunately, it acted like a mankiller as well. It turned out to be a cytotoxin, a cell poison with the strange selective trick of attacking some cells more than others. So virulent that one milligram could kill a large chicken, actinomycin seemed far too dangerous ever to try on humans. Last week in Rome, pleasantly surprised, Dr. Waksman told the International Congress of Microbiology that German scientists have finally taken the sting...
...Waksman himself tried hard to tame actinomycin, but none of his chemical tricks seemed to work. After thousands of animals had been killed in his Rutgers University lab, he gave up and began hunting other antibiotics. By 1943, he found the wonder drug, streptomycin. In 1949. he and his assistants produced neomycin (TIME, April 4, 1949). Actinomycin became a half-forgotten curiosity. Dr. Waksman kept only a sample somewhere in the litter on his desk...
Meanwhile, in West Germany's Bayer Institute for Experimental Pathology, other researchers read his reports on the drug's selective toxin. Directed by another Nobel Prizewinner, Professor Gerhard Domagk, the Germans took up where Waksman left off. Working with fungus cultures, they isolated actinomycin C, a new form of the original antibiotic...
...Actinomycin C worked wonders against some malignant tumors in animals. Unlike its predecessor, it had no seriously poisonous side effects. Cautiously (beginning with minute doses that were slowly raised to 250 micrograms), it was given to patients suffering from cancer of the lymphatic system. In several cases, the cancers shrank in size...