Word: penicillin
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Science coverage is not always so perspicacious. Though penicillin was discovered in the late '20s, it did not make big news until World War II. The discovery of DNA, too, took some years to become widely known. Some stories, however, were news from the start...
Medical news last week vied with news of the days before an invasion. Under the aspect of eternity, the medical news might even be more important than the military. The War Production Board announced that the wonder drug penicillin, for three years practically a monopoly of the Army & Navy, was now being manufactured in such quantity that it can be issued to civilians. Some 1,000 hospitals will be allowed to buy generous monthly quotas for distribution to patients and other hospitals...
...impatient sufferers (many of them dying), the good news came none too soon. Penicillin (sometimes rhymes with villain, sometimes with whistle in) is the best treatment for all staphylococcic infections, all hemolytic streptococcic infections, pneumococcic infections (of the lining of skull, spinal cord, lung and heart surfaces), pneumococcic pneumonia that sulfa drugs will not cure, all gonococcic infections (including all gonorrhea that sulfa drugs will not cure). Diseases against which penicillin is effective but not fully tested: syphilis, actinomycosis, bacterial endocarditis...
...When Gandhi's wife was stricken with pneumonia, British doctors told her husband that a shot of penicillin would heal her; nevertheless, Gandhi refused to have alien medicine injected into her body, and she died. Soon after, Gandhi caught malaria and, relenting from the standard applied to his wife, allowed doctors to save his life with quinine. He also allowed British doctors to perform an appendectomy on him, an alien operation if ever there was one. None of this made it to the screen...
Long after penicillin became generally available as a cure for syphilis in 1953, the men were still denied treatment and allowed slowly to die. If the press had not brought the case to light in 1972, the experiment would have continued. Even after the story broke, federal officials argued for months about whether the government was authorized to give health care to the experiment's survivors; finally, Caper W. Wainbanger '35 who was then Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare) ordered medical treatment...