In 1942, Anne Miller, a young woman, was rushed to hospital with a high fever, delirium and a serious streptococcal infection ravaging her body. She was drifting away and death was approaching her.
By an incredible stroke of luck, her doctor gained access to one tiny batch of a new medicine, which wasn’t even commercially available yet. It was rushed via plane and state troopers to Yale-New Haven Hospital and urgently administered to her.
Miraculously, her recovery began within hours. The fever subsided, the delirium ended and within a few weeks, she recovered. The drug given to her was in such short supply that her urine was saved so it could be shipped back to the Merck pharmaceutical company in New Jersey so that the drug could be re-extracted for another patient.
Yet, that was about to change shortly.
In 1943, Mary Hunt, who worked for the Department of Agriculture’s Northern Regional Research Laboratory in Illinois, went on a strange grocery shopping spree. Her shopping list puzzled the shops she frequented. She scoured markets and shops looking for mouldy fruits, vegetables, cheese, and bread. She brought a mouldy cantaloupe (rockmelon) to the lab and what happened next changed the course of history.
She had found a strain of Penicilium mould that could be used to mass produce penicillin, earning herself the nickname Mouldy Mary. Its mutant yielded 1000 times the amount of penicillin as the strain that Fleming had discovered. Within two years, 100 billion units of penicillin were produced each month (one unit of penicillin is 0.6 microgram). All strains of penicillin today are descendants from that 1943 mould.
Years before that in 1928, the Scottish scientist Alexander Fleming had discovered the antibiotic nature of the mould Penicillium. Over the next months after his discovery, Fleming was able to grow the mould in liquid broth, pass it through a filter and isolate a fluid that had strong antibacterial properties. However, many people don’t know that finding the right strain of mould for practical use was difficult. They were either not the right strain or were not prolific enough. The yields were tiny, unstable, short-lived and slow acting. He actually gave up on the endeavor after two years of fruitless search (pun intended).
(the 90-year-old swatch of mould first created by Alexander Fleming to make penicillin was auctioned at a whopping $15,000)
With the outbreak of the Second World War, the need for antibiotics again became pressing. In 1940, a team led by Howard Florey and Ernst Chain at Oxford University dug up Fleming’s work and tried to develop ways to make it in quantity. Because London was being bombed, they took their project to New York and later to Illinois where the new Fermentation Division of the Northern Regional Research Lab was studying the metabolism of moulds.
Despite their substantial collection of moulds, few of their strains made penicillin. The researchers embarked on probably one of the first crowdsourcing projects in history by sending out a call to the public to send them samples of soil, mouldy grain, fruits and vegetables.
With that humble rockmelon, penicillin began being produced in mass quantities, saving the lives of many toward the end of the war, ushering in a golden age in medicine.
Thanks for reading 🙏
Chinnu Jeeva tech 