Almost everyone has used an antibiotic like penicillin or terramycin at one time or another. You may have tried using an antibiotic ointment for severe cuts or scrapes, or your doctor has prescribed antibiotics to help you overcome fever, boils, pneumonia, and other infections. Antibiotics work so well against so many infections that they are often called “wonder drugs.” But the most accurate name for them would be “microbial drugs”, because that is what antibiotics really are. Antibiotics are essentially chemicals that help kill or stop the growth of certain germs and bacteria. It comes from two Greek words that mean “against life.”
More than 3000 years ago, Asian peoples had already stumbled upon molds that could cure certain afflictions. Both the Central American Indians and the Chinese used molds to treat infected wounds in eruptions, yet they did not understand diseases and treatments as we do now. Many of them thought in terms of magic and spiritualism, so they simply believed that molds drove away the evil spirits that cause disease. As time passed, the men had gradually acquired more knowledge about diseases. True understanding began only in recent times. In the 1860s, a French scientist Louis Pasteur showed that many diseases were caused by bacteria and concluded that man could learn to fight these bacteria using other bacteria.
Two German doctors, Rudolf Emmerich and Oskar Low, were the first men to make an effective medicine from microbes. Among other things, they successfully demonstrated that the germ that causes one disease can also cure another. The two men took germs from infected bandages and grew them in test tubes. They managed to isolate a vicious germ that caused the green coloration in infected and open wounds. This bacterium was Bacillus pyocyaneus. When doctors put some of these bacteria into test tubes that contained other germs, Bacillus pyocyaneus killed the other germs. The good news was that the other bacteria it managed to kill were the bacteria that caused cholera, diphtheria, anthrax, and typhoid fever.
Emmerich and Low began using Bacillus pyocyaneus to produce “pyocyanase.” This would be the first antibiotic to be used in hospitals, but unfortunately it was ahead of its time. No one knew how to control its production or how the chemical worked. It was also observed that the drug did not have the same effect in all patients. While some people got better, others just got sicker. So eventually pyocyanase was abandoned.
Other scientists continued to search for a safe and effective antibiotic, but it wasn’t until the summer of 1928 that a research scientist named Alexander Fleming produced the first real breakthrough in antibiotic medicine. While studying the germ called Staphylococcus aureaus (which causes a number of ailments that lead to brain disease), he noticed that molds in one of his Petri dishes were going bad. He noticed that around the mold stain was a ring of germ-free gelatin which meant that the mold had killed the germs around it. He did more research and finally called it penicillin. An American, Dr. Selman Waksman, discovered streptomycin, which was shown to be effective against diseases that penicillin could not cure, such as the bubonic plague.
Around the same time, sulfa drugs appeared. The drug was a chemical that had been found in a substance used to make dyes. They were powerful weapons against disease, but they had serious drawbacks. It was later discovered that sulfonamides did not kill germs but rather weakened them, giving the body a chance to defend itself.
Then research scientists began a worldwide search for the most useful soil microbes. A lab discovered aureomycin and it does the job of both penicillin and streptomycin. Another lab discovered chloromycetin, which was shown to be effective against typhus, whooping cough, and typhoid fever. In 1949, a laboratory in Indiana discovered terramycin, which is now considered one of the most effective antibiotics ever found due to its broad effect on so many bacterial diseases.
Still, the search continues. Pharmaceutical companies continue to search for new antibiotics in nature and their chemists are now producing synthetic antibiotics. Since it is very difficult for a chemist to mimic the work done by microbes, most antibiotics today are semi-synthetic. Chloromycetin, cycloserine, and a synthetic tetracycline were the first antibiotics produced entirely by man.
