Word: penicillin
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...scraped off some of the mold with a loop of platinum wire and grew the stuff by itself. In the fluid in which it multiplied was a something that killed several kinds of microbes. The mold was a variety of penicillium, and Fleming called the unseen but magical substance penicillin. He wrote about it in the British Journal of Experimental Pathology. One man paid close heed: Chemist Harold Raistrick extracted a crude form of penicillin, but was advised by senior doctors that it had no future as a medicine for humans-it was too unstable. Fleming's mold...
...1930s, came the sulfa drugs and a revival of interest in germ-killing chemicals. An Oxford research team composed of Pathologist (now Sir) Howard Florey and Chemist Ernst Chain dug up Fleming's moldy paper and did the tests all over again. By 1941 they got enough penicillin to prolong the lives of two patients. World War II had come to Europe and was threatening the U.S.: men, money and materials were lavished on the perfection and manufacture of penicillin...
Undoubted Queen. Penicillin was not technically the first of the antibiotics, but it was the first to make medical sense, let alone history. While Alexander Fleming went on puttering in his littered laboratory, interrupted often to accept awards and honors (most notable: a knighthood from George VI and, with Florey and Chain, a Nobel Prize), other antibiotics poured from researchers' vials. Some, like streptomycin for tuberculosis, proved to have sharply defined powers that penicillin lacked; others complement it with a spectrum of antibacterial activity...
...contribution to Britain's prosperity, it might not have been out of place to record a truly remarkable fact concerning three men of outstanding achievement in 20th-century science: John Logic Baird in television, Sir Robert Watson-Watt in radar, and Sir Alexander Fleming, who discovered penicillin. All were born and bred north of the Tweed. This makes them British, but never English...
With Minute Maid booming, Morse lost no time exploring other fields. National Research went into instant coffee (Holiday Brands, Inc..) and antibiotic drugs, now produces 90% of the drying equipment used by U.S. penicillin makers. For the electronics industry National Research developed high-vacuum machines for TV and radar-tube production...