Word: penicillium
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...athlete's foot, and jockstrap itch. Last week 300 specialists in fungus infections, convened in Manhattan under auspices of the New York Academy of Sciences, agreed that 1959 had marked a turning point in the history of man and his itches: a new antibiotic, griseofulvin (extracted from a Penicillium species closely related to the source of penicillin), is the best remedy so far discovered for fungus infections that obligingly concentrate on the body's outer surfaces...
Unseen Magic. Dr. Fleming 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...
...irradiate cheese-starting materials, the bacteria cultures that are curdled in milk to give cheeses their individual flavors. Knight turned his findings over to University of Minnesota scientists, who began the job of making a new cheese. Their base was the shepherd boy's familiar mold, now called Penicillium roquejortii...
...discovery of penicillin (almost by accident) in 1928 was a conspicuous breakthrough. Britain's Dr. Alexander Fleming noticed that the mold Penicillium notatum secretes a substance that kills certain bacteria growing on culture dishes. Later it was found that the secretion also kills many disease-producing organisms in the human body. It also does its job without any appreciable damage to human tissues. Fleming's great discovery focused attention on the fact that some micro-organisms are powerful chemical weapons that can be used against other disease-causing microorganisms...
...spite of such failings, gramicidin touched off a chain reaction. Dubos announced its discovery in 1939. A group of British researchers heard about it and recalled Alexander Fleming's Penicillium notatum. The substance it secreted is penicillin. Ripples of excitement spread through the world's biological laboratories...