Word: micro
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...that kills certain bacteria growing on culture dishes. Later it was found that the secretion also kills many disease-producing organisms in the human body. It also does its job without any appreciable damage to human tissues. Fleming's great discovery focused attention on the fact that some micro-organisms are powerful chemical weapons that can be used against other disease-causing microorganisms...
...Every place that is favorable for the growth of micro-organisms (and most places are) is a churning battleground of small, fierce creatures. A pinch of moist soil weighing one gram, for instance, may contain more bacteria (up to 2 billion) than there are people on earth. Among the ordinary creatures prowl savage protozoa engulfing them one by one. There is an underworld, too, made up of submicroscopic viruses, hardly more than big molecules, which often invade the larger organisms and multiply explosively...
Dust to Dust. Long before Waksman began his work on soil, scientists had noted that if a diseased body is buried, the point of burial does not become a plague spot. Instead, something in the soil destroys the germs. It was proved that micro-organisms were doing the police job. But how, exactly, did one microorganism destroy another? By eating it? Beating it to the feed trough? Chemical warfare...
Brilliant young Dubos went to work on a fantastic idea which, like many great ideas, was almost laughably simple: Why not feed disease germs to soil micro-organisms and see which species thrived on the diet...
Dubos took samples from patches of soil and noted which micro-organisms were present in them and how many of each kind. Then he made a brew of pneumonia bacteria and poured it on material from the patches. He repeated the experiment many times, watching for changes in the soil's microscopic population. Some of the organisms thrived on the strange diet, indicating that they might destroy pneumonia bacteria. Dubos made cultures of the hardy fighters and tested them against various disease-causing organisms...