Word: penicillins
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...improbable chain of events that led Alexander Fleming to discover penicillin in 1928 is the stuff of which scientific myths are made. Fleming, a young Scottish research scientist with a profitable side practice treating the syphilis infections of prominent London artists, was pursuing his pet theory--that his own nasal mucus had antibacterial effects--when he left a culture plate smeared with Staphylococcus bacteria on his lab bench while he went on a two-week holiday...
...discovery that would change the course of history. The active ingredient in that mold, which Fleming named penicillin, turned out to be an infection-fighting agent of enormous potency. When it was finally recognized for what it was--the most efficacious life-saving drug in the world--penicillin would alter forever the treatment of bacterial infections. By the middle of the century, Fleming's discovery had spawned a huge pharmaceutical industry, churning out synthetic penicillins that would conquer some of mankind's most ancient scourges, including syphilis, gangrene and tuberculosis...
...recognized the importance of his findings. He would later say, "My only merit is that I did not neglect the observation and that I pursued the subject as a bacteriologist." Although he went on to perform additional experiments, he never conducted the one that would have been key: injecting penicillin into infected mice. Fleming's initial work was reported in 1929 in the British Journal of Experimental Pathology, but it would remain in relative obscurity for a decade...
...Fleming had abandoned his work on penicillin. He would have no further role in the subsequent development of this or any other antibiotic, aside from happily providing other researchers with samples of his mold. It is said that he lacked both the chemical expertise to purify penicillin and the conviction that drugs could cure serious infections. However, he did safeguard his unusual strain of Penicillium notatum for posterity. The baton of antibiotic development was passed to others...
...scientific tour de force, Florey, Chain and their colleagues rapidly purified penicillin in sufficient quantity to perform the experiment that Fleming could not: successfully treating mice that had been given lethal doses of bacteria. Within a year, their results were published in a seminal paper in the Lancet. As the world took notice, they swiftly demonstrated that injections of penicillin caused miraculous recoveries in patients with a variety of infections...