Penicillin History and Uses

Have you ever been sick with strep throat, an ear or mouth infection, tuberculosis, or syphilis? If so, you had a bacterial infection and probably visited your doctor. He prescribed to you an antibiotic called penicillin. Penicillin is a life-saving drug and was the start of antibiotics.

Penicillin is a type of drug called an antibiotic that kills bacteria, but what are bacteria? Bacteria, named after the Greek word meaning “small rod”, were first discovered in the late 1600’s. They are single-celled organisms, and are found everywhere on earth. Bacteria are prokaryotes, meaning that they lack a nucleus. All cells store their genetic information, called DNA, in a nucleus. So where do bacteria store theirs? Bacteria store their DNA in a single loop that floats around their cytoplasm. Most bacteria are helpful; they live in our gut and help us digest food. Only a handful of bacteria are harmful; those bacteria are called pathogens. Pathogens infect you, reproduce, and produce toxins that damage your body and can eventually kill you.

Even though Pathogens may be very dangerous, your body has ways of combating them. Your body's first line of defense is actually bacteria. The good bacteria that are in your gut crowd out any pathogens that would make you sick. Some also produce chemicals that kill bad bacteria. After the bacteria, your body has white blood cells that create antibodies that inhibit or kill bacteria. You also get very hot. Hot temperatures, or fevers, are caused by chemical signals rushed to the part of your brain that regulates your body temperature. The heat creates a hostile environment that kills bacteria. Even with all the measures your body takes to defend against bacteria, sometimes it just does not work. Bacteria reproduce at an alarming rate and can mutate frequently to adapt to any conditions. This is why penicillin is such a life-saving drug.

Before the age of penicillin and antibiotics, there was no effective way to treat a bacterial infection; you could contract blood poisoning from just a cut or scratch. Hospitals were always full of people sick with with bacterial infections. There were treatments, like the sulfa drug, but it was ineffective in most cases. They also had antiseptics, but those were only good for sterilization, and they were toxic to the body.

Alexander Fleming was credited to the initial discovery of penicillin. Fleming was a professor of bacteriology at Saint Mary’s Hospital in London. He was trying to create antiseptics that were not harmful to animal tissue when he found Penicillium Notatum, a mold, in one of his petri dishes containing staphylococci. The mold was secreting a juice that killed the bacteria around it, so Fleming began to study it, and named it “mold juice”. He later named the mold juice penicillin. He discovered that penicillin stops bacteria by destroying their cells walls and inhibiting them from forming new ones. This means the bacteria can not reproduce and they stretch out their cell walls until they explode. Fleming would study the penicillin on and off, but could only create a crude substance to test. He was never able to isolate pure penicillin, but stated in medical journals that penicillin had huge clinical potentials.

Later, two scientists, Howard Florey and Ernst Chain, were the first to isolate pure penicillin. They picked up Fleming's research during WWII. During the war, soldiers who did not die from their wounds died from bacterial infections. The scientists were faced with the challenge of isolating pure penicillin on a miniscule budget. Great Britain was still in WWII and could not give much money to the research team, so they had to improvise for most of their equipment. They had to use bathtubs, bedpans, and food tins to grow the penicillin. Their materials and instruments were crude. Eventually, they were able to produce pure penicillin, but there was one downside: producing penicillin was slow. They even hired a team of penicillin girls, paying £2 a week to look after fermentation, but they needed substantial amounts of penicillin for clinical trials.

Finally, in 1940, Florey carried out experiments showing that his penicillin could protect mice against an infection called Streptococci. The first human trial was in 1941. A 43-year-old police officer named Albert Alexander became the first recipient of penicillin when he contracted a deadly infection. He had scratched the side of his cheek while pruning roses, and had developed huge abscesses in his eyes, face, and lungs. After doctors injected him with penicillin, he began to make a miraculous recovery. Unfortunately, supplies of the drug ran out, and he died several days later. Luckily, results were better with other patients, and Florey made plans to produce penicillin for the Allied troops. Some British companies like, Glaxo and Kemball Bishop, helped to produce penicillin for the war, but they needed more large-scale production, which would be hard in Britain, because the chemical industry was so absorbed in the war effort.

In 1941, the Rockefeller Foundation supported Florey and Norman Heatley to travel to the U.S. They were trying to interest the pharmaceutical industry in America to produce penicillin large-scale for more clinical trials and, eventually, to send to the Allies. A friend of Florey's, Yale physiologist John Fulton, helped him get in touch with people who could help him with scaling up the production of penicillin, including the head of the department of agriculture Robert Thom and the NRRL. The director of NRRL, Orville May, had the laboratory working on increasing penicillin yields. These contacts were a huge factor in large-scale production of penicillin.

While Heatley stayed at the NRRL to work on the mold, Florey went to talk to the pharmaceutical industry. While he was initially disappointed about the trip, three of the companies: Merck, Squibb, and Lilly, had already conducted penicillin research. Companies started producing penicillin in America. They also discovered a new strain of the mold, Penicillium Chrysogenum, growing on a cantaloupe that could produce two hundred times more penicillin, and after the super-penicillin team was done refining the mold to produce more penicillin, the new mold could produce one-thousand times more penicillin than Fleming’s original mold. Penicillin was eventually made large-scale and shipped to troops invading Europe. It was not commercially available until after the war.

Although there are many more antibiotics now that affect many more types of bacteria, penicillin began the era of antibiotics. It was a life-saving drug that was invented when it was needed most. It played a big part in taking back Europe from the Axis Powers and saving many lives. It is estimated that penicillin has saved more than eighty million lives since its initial discovery.