Word: penicillin
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...Penicillin was still making news last week. In Britain, its discoverer and chief developer, Professors Alexander Fleming and Howard W. Florey (TIME, May 15), were knighted by King George VI. Sir Howard reported progress toward chemical synthesis of the drug. In the U.S. the available supply for civilians was doubled: penicillin was shipped to 1,000 more hospitals, including some in Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands. But the biggest news was on the production front. In May, U.S. plants made 100 billion units of penicillin - one-third more than in April and just 250 times as much...
...first, penicillin was produced only in small flasks (relatively easy to protect against contamination) from a strain of the mold, Penicillium notatum. In Dr. Coghill's laboratory, mycologists developed new, heavier-yielding strains. They also found that the mold's growth could be greatly speeded in a brew of lactose made from skimmed milk and steep liquor made from corn...
...biggest step forward was the development of a method of making penicillin in tanks instead of in flasks. The tank ("submerged") method has saved much labor, cut the minimum cycle of the mold's growth from six to three days, helped cut the price of penicillin nearly 85%. Present average costs of penicillin treatments: $35 for severe septicemia (1,000,000 units), $5 for gonorrhea (150,000 units...
Nonetheless, though authorities predicted in January that all needs for penicillin could be met by this month, production is still far behind demand. Reason: new uses for penicillin are being discovered faster than new methods of production...
Beetle Blaster. Last week the developers of DDT, Geigy Co., Inc., an old dye firm with branches in Switzerland and New York, told reporters in Manhattan how the chemical was discovered. Like penicillin, DDT was known long before its usefulness was appreciated. A complicated chemical (full name: dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane), whose chief ingredients are chlorine, alcohol and sulfuric acid, DDT was first synthesized in 1874 by a German student named Othmar Zeidler. He had no idea of its possibilities as an insecticide, dismissed his discovery in six lines in a German chemical journal...