Word: drugged
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...public, forever hopeful of finding a cure for the common cold, was eagerly buying newfangled pills last week. The drugs, heretofore available only on a doctor's prescription, were selling over drug counters as fast and freely as bubble...
...germs were a special strain. They had licked their weight in penicillin, and come back to knock out streptomycin, chloramphenicol and aureomycin. Unchecked, they were a sure bet to kill the farmer. Dr. Garfield G. Duncan pitted the tough germs in a test tube against neomycin. The drug murdered them...
Then Dr. Duncan tried Waksman's supposedly dangerous drug on the patient. Within a few hours the infection was licked, and a few days later the fat farmer walked out, pain-free for the first time in years. Says Dr. Duncan: "There may not be many cases like this, but if we can save only one or two patients a year with a drug like neomycin, that drug has justified its existence...
While Waksman waits to set up his institute with streptomycin money, the search for better antibiotics goes on. The requirements for a new antibiotic seeking membership in the select club are getting stiffer all the time. Explains Waksman: to qualify, a new drug must kill some kinds of germs more effectively than any drug now known; it must work well in the body and not damage the body; it should be stable and soluble in water...
...biggest class of germs against which no drug (antibiotic or otherwise) has been found effective: the viruses. Rutgers has just added a virologist, Dr. Vincent Groupe, to Waksman's staff. Thus far, Groupe can report no progress, but neither can other virologists; the job may take years. But Waksman is sure that some day, somewhere, something will be found to ease the horror of poliomyelitis and the nuisance of the common cold. That something may well be an unknown microorganism fighting its battle in the soil...