Who discovered Penicillin? Who prepaid the first purified Penicillin?
First PENICILLIN.
The first PENICILLIN was discovered by Dr Alexander Fleming at St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington, London in September 1928. Having been absent on holiday since the previous mouth, Fleming had left a pile of culture plates in a corner of the laboratory beyond the reach of the sun. These were about to be submerged in antiseptic when he took a number of plates from off the pile in order to demonstrate a point to research scholar D.M. Pryce. One of the plates displayed unusual characteristics, as there was an absence of staphylococcal colonies in the vicinity of the mould. Following an intensive study of the phenomenon, Fleming made his initial findings known when he read a paper, ‘Cultures of a Penicillium’, to the Medical Research Club on 13 February 1929. Audience reaction was nil, no questions being asked at the end as was customary when a theory or new discovery had excited the members’ interest.
The first Clinical application of crude penicillin was made at St Mary’s on 9 January 1929, when Fleming treated his assistant, Stuart Craddock, for an infected antrum by washing out the sinus with diluted penicillin broth and succeeded in destroying most of the staphylococci. Rather more effective use of the drug was made in 1913 at the Royal Infirmary, Sheffield. Here Dr C.G. Paine successfully relieved two cases of gonococcal opthalmitis in children (gonorrhoea contracted from their mothers at birth) and one of an adult suffering from severe pneumococcal infection of the eye. The latter was a Colliery Manager who had been injured down the pit when a small piece of stone had lodged behind the pupil of his right eye. Penicillin cleared the infection, enabling an operation to be carried out to remove the chipping. The patient subsequently recovered his normal vision. These were probably the first cases in which ordinary hospital patients were successfully treated with penicillin, though all these applications were local and no attempt was made to establish the possibility of effective chemotherapy of the common bacterial infections. There was little further development during the remainder of the decade.
Purified penicillin was first prepared at the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology at Oxford during the summer of 1940 by Prof Howard Florey of Ade aide, South Australia, and Prof Ernest Chain, a German-born Jewish refugee. Florey announced the results of their research in a paper titled ‘Penicillin as a Chemotherapeutic Agent’, which appeared in the Lancet for 24 August 1940.
The first Clinical application of purified penicillin took place at the Radcliffe Infirmary, Oxford on 12 February 1941, the patient being a policeman suffering from generalized blood poisoning from a small sore at the corner of his mouth. A striking improvement was made in his condition after 800 mg of penicillin had been administered in 24 hr, but within five days Florey’s team had exhausted the entire world supply of the drug and on 15 March the patient died.
The first completely successful treatment with penicillin began at the Radcliffe Infirmary on 3 May 1941, when a patient suffering from a 4 inch carbuncle was administered the drug intravenously. Within four days the infected area was already healing and on 1.5 May the patient was discharged from hospital. The first large-scale plant for the regular production of penicillin was constructed at the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology at Oxford under the direction of Prof. Chain in the summer of 1941. The first commercial firm to undertake production of penicillin was Kemball, Bishop & Co. of Bromley-by-Bow, which delivered its initial consignment of twenty 10-gal churns of penicillin brew to the School of Pathology ‘as a free gift in the interest of science’ on 11 September 1942.
Most of the penicillin produced in Britain during World War II was reserved for military use. It was first made widely available to civilians in Prof. Florey’s native Australia, where the Commonwealth Serum Laboratories at Melbourne started production in 1943.
Sir Alexander Fleming, Sir Howard Florey and Dr E.B. Chain were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in October 1945 for their work on penicillin.
