Word: gramicidin
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Dates: during 1940-1940
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...gave the world sulfanilamide. as a great benefactor of chemotherapeutical medicine. Starting with a hunch that there must be agents in the soil capable of breaking up almost anything organic, piling up experiments year after year. Dr. Dubos recently told how he isolated from soil bacilli a substance called "gramicidin," which-in experimental animals-kills pneumococci of five kinds, streptococci, diphtheria bacilli, and other "gram-positive" (blue-staining) germs, possibly including the tubercle bacillus (TIME, April...
This crystalline killer has been named "gramicidin" because its victims all belong to the large class of microbes which take the gentian violet and iodine stain developed by Hans Christian Joachim Gram of Denmark. Gramicidin protects mice against huge doses of virulent pneumococci and all the other blue-staining germs so far tested. Since the tubercle bacillus belongs to this group, it seems almost certain to succumb to gramicidin...
Unlike the sulfonamide compounds (sulfanilamide, sulfapyridine, sulfathiazole, etc.), which have abundantly proved their worth for humans, gramicidin has so far been tried only on animals. Dr. Dubos prefers to regard his work to date as an adventure in experimental science. Doctors are keeping their fingers crossed, but at Cleveland they hollered their heads off for the experiment...