Word: streptomycin
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People are always asking greying Microbiologist Selman Abraham Waksman, 60, how he discovered the wonder drug streptomycin in 1943. Modest Dr. Waksman (rhymes with phlox-man) has a stock answer which makes it sound pretty simple. He merely examined about 10,000 cultures, he explains. Only 1,000 would kill bacteria in preliminary tests; only 100 looked promising in later tests; only ten were isolated and described; one of the ten proved to be streptomycin. It just happened that streptomycin was the first effective drug that doctors had ever found to fight tuberculosis...
...associates at Lederle Laboratories, Pearl River, N.Y. had been studying bits of soil from all parts of the U.S. Dr. Duggar, who retired in 1943 as professor of botany at the University of Wisconsin, was looking for a new antibiotic to place beside the two best known, penicillin and streptomycin...
Scientists often reach worthwhile goals by setting off in the wrong direction. Dr. Alma J. Whiffen of the Upjohn Co. did just that, several years ago. She noticed that Streptomyces griseus, the mold that produces bacteria-killing streptomycin, also produces a substance that is deadly to fungi. She separated it from the "beers" (solution in which the mold had been growing), called it "actidione," and tried it on fungi that cause human diseases...
This week the Upjohn Co. proudly announced that it had something new for agriculture: an antibiotic that might save the lives of the farmer's plants, as penicillin and streptomycin have saved the lives of people...
Sulfa drugs, used with streptomycin, a combination discovered within the past few years, protect against the two most common forms of the plague: bubonic, which attacks the lymph glands, and pneumonic, which attacks the lungs. Sulfa drugs alone work too, in most cases after bubonic plague has struck. In one district in rural China, said Dr. Pollitzer, his WHO teams found 44 cases, saved 41. For the pneumonic form, there is rabbit serum, developed two years ago at the Hooper Foundation's animal building, known to laboratory workers and San Francisco newspapers as "Mousetown"; rabbits, like man but unlike...