Word: penicillins
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Every week U.S. physicians are being bombarded with samples and ads of prefabricated antibiotic combinations-penicillin with novobiocin, neomycin with bacitracin, oleandomycin with tetracycline, and dozens more. In addition, antibiotics are offered in combination with the sulfas or with unrelated items-anti-histamines, hormones, vitamins. Just how good are these package drugs...
...doctors decided that they could save the ear. With eight neat stitches they sewed it back, taped it to the side of Velazquez' head and gave him penicillin and anti-tetanus injections. Then, reluctantly, they watched him march back to the ring. With vengeance in his eye and blood bespattering his "suit of lights," he faced his second bull. Taking quick control, he played the bull with daring passes that brought the crowd to its feet chanting oles. Then, in a sudden hush, he killed the bull cleanly with a single thrust. As the bull dropped to its knees...
After nine years of dogged work, Chemist John C. Sheehan of M.I.T. announced last week that he had discovered a practical method of synthesizing penicillin V, one of the two most useful forms of the natural antibiotic made by the penicillin mold...
...molecule is not unusually complicated, but extremely fragile. Any kind of rough treatment, such as heat or acids, makes it fall into fragments that cannot kill any kind of germ. To use the customary chemical methods on penicillin, says Dr. Sheehan, "would be like attempting to repair a fine watch with a blacksmith's sledge and anvil." The critical problem was to find a way to bond a carbon atom and a nitrogen atom to form a chemical ring in the heart of the molecule. Avoiding many standard reagents as too violent, and keeping his solutions at room temperature...
There is little chance that Sheehan's method will be used to manufacture penicillin V commercially, since it can be made cheaply by fermentation. But now that the delicate molecule can be built up and modified in the laboratory, new kinds of penicillin can be produced. Using Sheehan's methods, Merck, Sharp & Dohme Research Laboratories at Rahway, NJ. has already synthesized ten new penicillin compounds that cannot be made by fermentation. Dr. Sheehan's great hope is that the new synthetic penicillins may prove free of natural penicillin's tendency to cause serious allergic effects...