Word: penicillin
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...sleuthing doctors are right, chemists may soon know how to make penicillin synthetically-and penicillin is desperately scarce. This speculation popped out of a report to the American Chemical Society, in which Manhattan's Drs. Gustav J. Martin and C. Virginia Fisher observed that penicillin seems to act much like the acridine group of drugs which deprive bacteria of oxygen. The doctors even guessed that penicillin may turn out to be a member of this group which can be manufactured easily...
...Martin and Fisher also talked about a new extract of penicillium mold, penicillin B (the original penicillin must henceforth be called penicillin A). Penicillin B's attack is exactly opposite to A's-it supplies bacteria with too much oxygen. The two should never be used together, as they might cancel each other out. Researchers at St. Louis University who isolated the new penicillin B claim that it is ten times as effective as penicillin A, but even rarer...
...Professor Harry Warren Anderson of the University of Illinois's horticulture department has made a new drug, clavacin, from mold. He thinks it "may be more useful" than penicillin because, in test tubes, "it kills all bacteria killed by penicillin" and more besides. He has cured some plant diseases with clavacin but has yet to make tests on animals...
...hope for increased production is a new and speedier mold process developed by Stanford University's Bacteriologist Charles E. Clifton. Suggested by the method of making vinegar by dripping alcohol through wood shavings inoculated with bacteria, Clifton's laboratory experiments show that penicillin can be made by dribbling a mold-growing solution through shavings inoculated with the mold. In the present commercial process the mold grows in jars without mechanical help. Clifton's process would result in continuous production...
...cureall, penicillin has so far been uSed to treat only a limited group of infections: staphylococcus aureus (causing bone infections, cellulitis, face carbuncles, certain types of pneumonia), hemolytic streptococcus, gonorrhea...