Word: neomycin
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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This year (TIME, April 4), Dr. Waksman announced that he and an assistant, Hubert Lechevalier, had isolated another antibiotic from a soil microbe which Waksman named Streptomyces fradiae in honor of his mother. The drug, neomycin, is as effective as streptomycin against tubercle bacilli in the test tube, and Waksman hopes that it can be combined with streptomycin in treating tuberculosis...
...Farmer. It is still too early to put neomycin among the widely useful antibiotics because of possible harmful side effects such as kidney damage. But it has already been used with success as a last desperate measure. Just before Labor Day, a fat but unhappy farmer was admitted to Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia. He had a deep-seated infection caused by a common microbe, Aerobacter aerogenes, which is usually a pushover for penicillin or streptomycin...
...farmer's 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...
...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...
...years ago. Then Fleming set out for Rochester, Minn., and other research centers to do some personal research: he wants to know what details other workers have found out about the way penicillin works in the bloodstream. He also wants to learn more about the newer antibiotics: streptomycin, neomycin and aureomycin...