Word: penicillins
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...laboratory) the man who was to make Dr. Fleming's discovery save human lives was already at work on the problem. He was Dr. Howard Walter Florey, 45, an Australian-born professor of pathology. He organized a research team to study the practical extraction of capricious penicillin. The team included experts in chemistry, bacteriology, pathology and medicine. Among them : Mrs. Florey, who is also a doctor, and Dr. Ernst Boris Chain, a brilliant half-French, half-Russian enzyme chemist who shares with Dr. Florey the honors for developing penicillin...
...blue-green penicillium mold began to grow again. The researchers dis covered that the best growing temperature is about 75° F.,that the mold needs plenty of air. At first, Dr. Florey's researchers got only about a gram of reddish-brown powder (the sodium salt of penicillin -penicillin itself is an unstable acid) from 100 liters of the mold liquid. But at last, after heroic chemical cookery, they accumulated enough penicillin to test the drug on living creatures...
...Mice and Men. Then eight mice were inoculated with a deadly strain of streptococci. Says Dr. Florey: "We sat up through the night injecting penicillin every three hours into the treated group [four mice]. I must confess that it was one of the more exciting moments when we found in the morning that all the untreated mice were dead and all the penicillin-treated ones alive." During that historic night, Dr. Fleming's vision turned into a medical reality...
...Miracle. Last year penicillin patients were still rare enough to be frontpage news. First such case was two-year-old Patricia Malone (see cut) of Jackson Heights, Queens. The New York Journal-American, which begged enough penicillin from Dr. Keefer to save her life from staphylococcic septicemia, last week won the Pulitzer Prize for the story. After that, the whole nation watched one "hopeless" case after another get well...
There were the three doctors in the California mountains last winter who saved a seven-year-old girl when gas gangrene had forced repeated amputations of her left arm up to the shoulder: "As a last resort, penicillin was given after all hope had been abandoned for a recovery, which came like a miracle." There was a doctor in Sioux Falls, S.D., who was astonished to save a man moribund with osteomyelitis and septicemia after sulfadiazine had failed: "This being the first case in which I have employed penicillin therapy, I feel that the results obtained, to say the least...