Word: soils
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Brilliant young Dubos went to work on a fantastic idea which, like many great ideas, was almost laughably simple: Why not feed disease germs to soil micro-organisms and see which species thrived on the diet...
Dubos took samples from patches of soil and noted which micro-organisms were present in them and how many of each kind. Then he made a brew of pneumonia bacteria and poured it on material from the patches. He repeated the experiment many times, watching for changes in the soil's microscopic population. Some of the organisms thrived on the strange diet, indicating that they might destroy pneumonia bacteria. Dubos made cultures of the hardy fighters and tested them against various disease-causing organisms...
...this method and refinements of it, he at last found, in a sample of cranberry bog soil sent to him by Waksman, an organism from whose cultures he separated an active fraction that he named gramicidin. It killed or halted many disease bacteria, but it was dangerous for internal...
This year (TIME, April 4), Dr. Waksman announced that he and an assistant, Hubert Lechevalier, had isolated another antibiotic from a soil microbe which Waksman named Streptomyces fradiae in honor of his mother. The drug, neomycin, is as effective as streptomycin against tubercle bacilli in the test tube, and Waksman hopes that it can be combined with streptomycin in treating tuberculosis...
...progress, but neither can other virologists; the job may take years. But Waksman is sure that some day, somewhere, something will be found to ease the horror of poliomyelitis and the nuisance of the common cold. That something may well be an unknown microorganism fighting its battle in the soil...