Mycology Presents Penicillin

Abstract

A conservative medical official recently told a technical audience that Penicillin is the most potent agent * * * ever encountered, which produces no bad effects upon the patient. He then listed as conspicuous among microbial enemies of man which respond to penicillin, Gonococcus, Meningococcus, Streptococcus hemolyticus and S. viridans, Pneumococcus, Staphylococcus, Clostridium tetanus and C. Welchii, Corynebacterium diplhtheriae and Actinomyces bovis. Such a list justifies the caption miracle drug put upon it by another medical scholar who is rarely swayed by impulse. I am asked to trace the mycological history of the discovery and development of penicillin to its present place among things worth while. Since there are some misunderstandings as to its early history, the data will be presented in as verifiable order as possible. The first ten years. In 1929, Alexander Fleming reported the discovery and naming of penicillin. The essential facts of this discovery consisted (1) in the observation that a particular mold growing as a contaminant in a culture of Staphylococcus aureus inhibited the bacterium, i.e. that the Staphylococcus could not grow in a zone surrounding the mold colony. This observation was already well known as a phenomenon seen frequently when molds and bacteria are found growing together. Most commonly the observation is reversed-a mold fails to develop normally, if at all, in the presence of large numbers of bacteria. (2) Fleming went further and showed that the mold had produced an inhibiting substance in the nutrient substratum which could be separated from the fungus itself and used to inhibit certain bacteria. He tabulated a series of bacteria susceptible and other bacteria resistant to the inhibiting substance. (3) Since the mold was a species of the great genus Penicillium, he called his inhibiting substance penicillin. (4) Not being a mycologist, he undertook to