Northerner
Admin (Retired)
- Relationship to Diabetes
- Type 1
There?s a moment in the history of medicine that?s so cinematic it?s a wonder no one has put it in a Hollywood film. The scene is a London laboratory. The year is 1928. Alexander Fleming, a Scottish microbiologist, is back from a vacation and is cleaning up his work space. He notices that a speck of mold has invaded one of his cultures of Staphylococcus bacteria . It isn?t just spreading through the culture, though. It?s killing the bacteria surrounding it.
Fleming rescued the culture and carefully isolated the mold. He ran a series of experiments confirming that it was producing a Staphylococcus-killing molecule. And Fleming then discovered that the mold could kill many other species of infectious bacteria as well. ?I had a clue that here was something good, but I could not possibly know how good it was,? he later said.
No one at the time could have known how good penicillin was. In 1928, even a minor wound was a potential death sentence, because doctors were mostly helpless to stop bacterial infections. Through his investigations into that peculiar mold, Fleming became the first scientist to discover an antibiotic?an innovation that would eventually win him the Nobel Prize. Penicillin saved countless lives, killing off pathogens from staph to syphilis while causing few side effects. Fleming?s work also led other scientists to seek out and identify more antibiotics, which collectively changed the rules of medicine. Doctors could prescribe drugs that effectively wiped out most bacteria, without even knowing what kind of bacteria was making their patients ill.
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/03/ff_antivirals/
Fleming rescued the culture and carefully isolated the mold. He ran a series of experiments confirming that it was producing a Staphylococcus-killing molecule. And Fleming then discovered that the mold could kill many other species of infectious bacteria as well. ?I had a clue that here was something good, but I could not possibly know how good it was,? he later said.
No one at the time could have known how good penicillin was. In 1928, even a minor wound was a potential death sentence, because doctors were mostly helpless to stop bacterial infections. Through his investigations into that peculiar mold, Fleming became the first scientist to discover an antibiotic?an innovation that would eventually win him the Nobel Prize. Penicillin saved countless lives, killing off pathogens from staph to syphilis while causing few side effects. Fleming?s work also led other scientists to seek out and identify more antibiotics, which collectively changed the rules of medicine. Doctors could prescribe drugs that effectively wiped out most bacteria, without even knowing what kind of bacteria was making their patients ill.
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/03/ff_antivirals/