Up to the 20th century. bacterial infection, such as tuberculosis, meant a death sentence in most cases. Scottish doctor Alexander Fleming discovered in 1928 a substance that causes the death of bacteria - penicillin. However, his works remained unnoticed for a long time.
Systematic studies
Fleming worked in the bacteriological laboratory of St. Maria in London, from 1928 as a professor. He studied the problem of the growth and properties of staphylococci. The professor was famous for his sloppiness - cups with the remains of bacterial cultures stood unwashed on his desk for weeks. No wonder they eventually grew mold. While looking through the cups before another cleaning, Fleming noticed that there were no bacteria around the mold spots (a common penicillin fungus). The scientist examined penicillium and discovered that the fungus secretes a substance that has bactericidal properties. Fleming named this substance penicillin. Subsequently, it turned out that penicillin is capable of destroying many types of bacteria.
Long road to a cure
Since Fleming never learned how to make penicillin, the discovery did not arouse much interest among doctors. Only in 1939 did a team of scientists led by Howard Florey and Ernest Chain manage to isolate pure penicillin from mold and create a world-famous antibiotic based on it. In 1941, it began in the USA clinical trials, industrial production began in 1944. At first, the new medicine was available only to the Allied armed forces. After the end of World War II, they began to sell it to civilians. In 1945, Fleming, Florey and Cheyne were awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine.
Bacteria become resistant
Since then on pharmaceutical market New antibiotics are constantly emerging. This is due not only to the love of scientists for experiments, but also to actual necessity: it turned out that
- 1877: Louis Pasteur proclaimed the principle of antibiosis, the impossibility of the existence of some species in the presence of others, later confirmed by the action of antibiotics.
- 1935: the first sulfonamide appeared in pharmacies under trade name"prontosil".
- 1940: a team of researchers led by American microbiologist Zelman Waksman created the antibiotic streptomycin.
- 1946: Gerhard Domagk developed the first drug against tuberculosis.
Opening penicillin owned by Alexander Fleming. When he died, he was buried in St. Paul's Cathedral in London - next to the most revered Britons. In Greece, where the scientist visited, national mourning was declared on the day of his death. And in Spanish Barcelona, all the flower girls in the city poured armfuls of flowers from their baskets to the memorial plaque with his name
Scottish bacteriologist Alexander Fleming (1881-1955) was born in Ayrshire, the son of farmer Hugh Fleming and his second wife Grace (Morton) Fleming.
Alexander attended a small rural school located nearby, and later Kilmarnock Academy, and early learned to carefully observe nature. At the age of 13, he followed his older brothers to London, where he worked as a clerk, attended classes at the Regent Street Polytechnic, and in 1900 joined the London Scottish Regiment.
On the advice of his older brother, he applied to a national competition to enter medical school. Fleming received the highest scores in the exams and became a scholarship student at the medical school at St. Maria. Alexander studied surgery and, having passed his examinations, became a member of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1906. While remaining to work in the pathology laboratory of Professor Almroth Wright at St. Mary, he received his Master's and Bachelor's degrees from the University of London in 1908.
At that time, doctors and bacteriologists believed that further progress would be associated with attempts to change, enhance or supplement the properties immune system. The discovery of salvarsan in 1910 by Paul Ehrlich only confirmed these assumptions. Ehrlich was busy searching for what he called the “magic bullet,” meaning by this a means that would destroy bacteria that had entered the body without causing harm to the tissues of the patient’s body and even interacting with them.
Wright's laboratory was one of the first to receive samples of salvarsan for testing. In 1908, Fleming began experimenting with the drug, also using it in private medical practice to treat syphilis. Although fully aware of all the problems associated with salvarsan, he nevertheless believed in the possibilities of chemotherapy. For several years, however, the results of research were such that they could hardly confirm his assumptions.
From the corridor, through the slightly open door into a small, cramped laboratory, one could see Dr. Alexander Fleming, bustling around in a cramped room filled with many things. So he moves the Petri dishes from place to place,... carefully examines them and sorts them according to some characteristics known only to him. He needs to write a chapter on streptococci for a bacteriology textbook. To do this, he needs to conduct a series of experiments on numerous colonies of these microbes. He fills Petri dishes with agar-agar, which, as it cools, forms a smooth film at the bottom of the dishes; He plants a culture of bacteria on it. In this excellent nutrient medium, at the appropriate temperature, the bacteria develop and form large colonies that look like branched, amber-colored lumps.
In Fleming's laboratory, his worst enemy was mold. Common greenish-gray mold, which comes from nowhere in damp corners of poorly ventilated rooms, covers stale food products if they are not properly stored. Mold is nothing more than a microscopic fungus that arises from even smaller germs, thousands of which float in the air. As soon as the embryos find themselves in an environment favorable to them, they begin to grow very quickly.
Fleming more than once, lifting the lid of a Petri dish, was disappointed to see that streptococcal cultures were contaminated with mold. And indeed, in the laboratory it was enough to leave a Petri dish for several hours without a lid, and the entire nutrient layer became covered with mold. It cost Fleming a lot of work to combat unwanted impurities on one cup or another. One day, Fleming saw a strange phenomenon on one of the cups and looked closely at it for a long time. As has happened more than once, the cup was covered with mold, but unlike other cups, here a small round bald spot had formed around a colony of bacteria. There was an impression that bacteria did not multiply around the mold, although on the rest of the surface of the agar-agar, at some distance from the mold, bacteria grew, and quite strongly.
“A coincidence or a pattern?” Fleming wondered. To answer this question, Fleming placed a small amount of mold in a test tube with nutrient broth: he wanted, first of all, to preserve the strange mold. And he placed a cup with mold on the desk among other interesting samples Then he did not think that this cup would be his most precious treasure and that in it he would find a solution to the problem to which he had devoted his whole life. From a microscopic piece of mold, Fleming obtained a large colony. Then he placed part of this mold on the cups where he cultivated. different bacteria.
It turned out that some types of bacteria get along well with mold, but streptococci and staphylococci did not develop in the presence of mold. Numerous previous experiments with the proliferation of harmful bacteria have shown that some of them are capable of destroying others and do not allow their development in the general environment. This phenomenon was called “antibiosis” from the Greek “anti” - against and “bios” - life. Working on finding an effective antimicrobial agent, Fleming knew this very well. He had no doubt that on the cup with the mysterious mold he had encountered the phenomenon of antibiosis. He began to carefully examine the mold. After some time, he even managed to isolate an antimicrobial substance from mold. Since the mold he was dealing with had a specific Latin name Penicilium notatum he called the resulting substance penicillin. Thus, in 1929, in the laboratory of London's St. Mary gave birth to the well-known penicillin.
Preliminary tests of the substance on experimental animals showed that even when injected into the blood it does not cause harm, and at the same time in weak solutions it perfectly suppresses streptococci and staphylococci. Fleming's assistant, Dr. Stuart Graddock, fell ill purulent inflammation the so-called maxillary cavity, was the first person who decided to take penicillin. A small amount of mold extract was injected into his cavity, and within three hours it was clear that his health had improved significantly. It was clear that Fleming had won a major battle against bacteria. But mankind's war against microbes was not over yet: it was necessary to develop industrial methods for the production of penicillin. Fleming worked on this problem for more than two years, but did not achieve success. This explains the fact that the first article reporting on the antimicrobial properties of penicillin was written by Fleming three years after the end of experiments on its practical use.
Attempts were also unsuccessful industrial production penicillin, carried out by other researchers. But in mid-1939, two scientists from Oxford: physician Edward Howard Frey and chemist J. Ernest Chain took up the matter. After two years of disappointment and defeat, they managed to obtain a few grams of brown powder, which could already be tested on 117 people. Although it was not entirely pure, it was quite high-quality crystalline penicillin. The first injections of the new drug were given to a person on February 12, 1941. One of the London policemen cut himself with a razor while shaving. Blood poisoning developed. The first injection of penicillin was given to a dying patient. The patient's condition immediately improved. But there was too little penicillin, its supply quickly dried up. The disease returned and the patient died. Despite this, science triumphed, as it was conclusively proven that penicillin was excellent against blood poisoning. After a few months, scientists managed to accumulate such an amount of penicillin that could be more than enough to save a human life.
The lucky one was a fifteen-year-old boy suffering from blood poisoning that could not be treated. This was the first person whose life was saved by penicillin. At this time, the whole world had been engulfed in the fires of war for three years. Thousands of wounded people died from blood poisoning and gangrene. Required great amount penicillin. Frey went to the United States of America, where he managed to interest the government and large industrial concerns in the production of penicillin.
Everyone knows about penicillin. This antibiotic has saved many lives. But today it is no longer so popular, as more modern medicines have appeared. However, despite this, it can still be found in the pharmacy. Why is that? The fact is that penicillin helps much better with purulent infections and some inflammations than other antibiotics. In addition, it is safer for the human body. We will tell you more about penicillin and the history of its discovery in this article.
Penicillin is the first antibiotic that was discovered at the beginning of the 20th century. It was discovered by one famous bacteriologist - Alexander Fleming. During the war he worked as a military doctor. And at that time there were no antibiotics, so many people died due to blood poisoning, inflammation and complications. Fleming was very upset by this and he began to work on creating a medicine that could save people from various infections.
Thanks to his talent and perseverance, Fleming was already famous in scientific circles by the age of 20. At the same time, he was a terrible slob, but oddly enough, this was precisely what played a decisive role in his discovery. At that time, all experiments with bacteria were carried out in the simplest bioreactor (Petri dish). This is a wide glass cylinder with low walls and a lid. After each experiment, this bioreactor had to be well sterilized. And then one day Fleming got sick and during the experiment he sneezed, right into this Petri dish, into which he had already placed a bacterial culture. A normal doctor would immediately throw everything away and sterilize everything again. But Fleming did not do this.
A couple of days later, he checked the cup and saw that in some places all the bacteria had died, namely where he had sneezed. Fleming was surprised by this and began to work on it in more detail. A little later, he discovered lysozyme - a natural enzyme in the saliva of humans, animals and some plants, which destroys the walls of bacteria and dissolves them. But lysozyme acts too slowly, and not on all bacteria.
As mentioned above, Fleming was a slob and very rarely threw away the contents of Petri dishes. He did this only when the clean ones had already run out. And then one day he went on vacation, and left all the cups unwashed. During this time, the weather changed many times: it got colder, warmer, and the humidity level increased. Because of this, fungus and mold appeared. When the scientist returned home, he started cleaning and noticed that in one cup with staphylococci there was mold that killed these bacteria. By the way, this mold was also introduced completely by accident.
Until the 40s, Fleming actively studied his new discovery and tried to understand production technology. And he had to fail many times. Penicillin was very difficult to isolate, and its production was not only expensive, but also slow. Therefore, he almost abandoned his discovery. But Oxford University doctors saw future potential of this medicine and continued Fleming's work. They disassembled the technology for the production of penicillin, and already in 1941, thanks to this antibiotic, the lives of 15 people were saved year old teenager who had blood poisoning.
As it turned out later, similar studies were also carried out in the USSR. In 1942, penicillin was obtained by Zinaida Ermolyeva, a Soviet microbiologist.
By 1952, the technology had been improved, and this antibiotic could be purchased at any pharmacy. It has become widely used to treat various inflammations: pneumonia, gonorrhea, and so on.
We all know that antibiotics destroy not only pathogenic microbes, but also our microflora, that is, beneficial microbes. Penicillin works completely differently. It does not cause any harm to the human body and only acts on bacteria. This antibiotic blocks the synthesis of peptidoglycan, which takes part in the construction of new bacterial cell walls. As a result, the proliferation of bacteria stops. Our cell membranes have a different structure, so they do not react in any way to the administration of the drug.
A lot of time has passed since the creation of penicillin. Scientists have already discovered the fourth generation of antibiotics. Therefore, most doctors began to make complaints about penicillin - they say it is no longer effective, since the bacteria are accustomed to it. In addition, it disrupts the intestinal microflora. But is this really so?
Doctors are right about the fact that antibiotics disrupt the intestinal microflora. But we should not forget that today there are special preparations that help restore this microflora. In addition, antibiotics are no more harmful than smoking, alcohol, and so on.
Allergy to penicillin
With any medicine a person may experience allergic reaction. Therefore, taking any medication, especially antibiotics, should be prescribed and monitored by a doctor.
An allergic reaction to penicillin manifests itself as follows:
- signs of hives may appear;
- anaphylaxis;
- attacks of suffocation;
- angioedema;
- fever.
To avoid such symptoms, it is recommended to conduct an allergy test before prescribing treatment with penicillin. To do this, you need to inject a small amount of antibiotic into the patient and see what the body’s reaction will be. In small quantities, the drug will not cause any harm, so there is no need to worry that the sample may cause one of the above symptoms.
It is also worth noting that an allergy to penicillin may disappear over time. This is evidenced by some studies conducted by specialists.
As you can see, penicillin is a very useful antibiotic. During the time that it existed, this medicine was able to save many lives. It is prescribed for inflammatory processes. Since its discovery, it has been improved several times. Due to this, the microbes have not yet adapted to it. This is the reason for the highly effective action of this antibiotic.
When I got up on the morning of September 28, 1928, I certainly did not plan to make any breakthrough in medicine with my creation of the world’s first killer bacteria or antibiotic,” these words were noted in the diary of Alexander Fleming, the man who discovered us penicillin.
Still at the beginning XIX century the idea arose to use microbes in the fight against microbes themselves. Scientists already in those distant times understood that in order to combat complications from wounds, it was necessary to find a way to paralyze the microbes that cause further complications, and that it is possible to neutralize microorganisms with their help. In particular, Louis Pasteur realized that bacilli anthrax can be destroyed when exposed to certain other microbes. Around 1897, Ernest Duchesne used the mold, i.e., the characteristics of penicillin, to treat typhus in guinea pigs.
It is believed that penicillin was actually invented on September 3, 1928. By this period, Fleming was already popular and known as a brilliant researcher. At that time, he was studying staphylococci, but his laboratory could often be found in an unkempt state, which turned out to be the reason for the discovery.
On September 3, 1928, Fleming returned to his laboratory after being away for a month. He tried to collect all the staphylococci, and then he came across one plate on which mold fungi had formed, and the colonies of staphylococci on it were destroyed, and there were practically no other colonies. The researcher took with him the mushrooms that formed on the plate with his cultures, attributed them to the genus Penicillium, and called the isolated substance penicillin. Upon further study, he noticed that penicillin had an effect on staphylococci and other pathogens that cause pneumonia, scarlet fever, diphtheria and meningitis. But this remedy could not fight typhoid fever and paratyphoid.
Publication of Fleming's discovery.
Fleming published a report on his new discovery in 1929 in a British journal, which was dedicated to experimental pathology. In the same year, he was still engaged in research and soon discovered that working with penicillin was difficult, production was quite slow, and, moreover, penicillin was not able to take root in human body very long to kill bacteria. Also, the scientist was unable to extract and purify the active substance. Until the beginning of 1942, the scientist tried to improve the new invention, but until 1939 he was not able to develop an impeccable culture. In 1940, the Anglo-German biochemist Howard Walter Florey and Ernst Boris Chain actively tried to purify and obtain penicillin, and after some period of time they produced the necessary amount of penicillin in order to treat the wounded.
Already at the beginning of the 1941s, penicillin was obtained in the required quantities for a positive dose. The first person to be saved by a completely new antibiotic was a 15-year-old boy who had blood poisoning. In 1945, Fleming, Cheyne and Florey were awarded Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology “For the discovery of penicillin and its healing effects for any infectious diseases.”
Penicillin in medicine.
During World War II, the United States was already producing penicillin, which saved a huge number of US soldiers and neighboring countries. Over time, the method of creating an antibiotic was improved, and since 1952, fairly affordable penicillin began to be used on a global scale.Penicillin helps fight various diseases: osteomyelitis, syphilis, pneumonia, puerperal fever. It also helps prevent the formation of infections after burns and wounds - in former times all these diseases had fatal outcome. With the development of pharmacology, they isolated and synthesized antibacterial agents other categories, and when they received other types of antibiotics, they were able to fight this fatal disease like tuberculosis.
For a couple of decades, antibiotics were a panacea for any disease, but Alexander Fleming himself said that there is no need to use penicillin before diagnosing the disease, and there is no need to use the antibiotic for a short period and in small doses, because under these conditions bacteria can develop resistance . Most experts believe that antibiotics are ineffective in fighting disease, but patients themselves are to blame for this because they do not always take antibiotics as prescribed by the doctor or in the required doses.
“The problem of resistance is quite large and affects everyone. This leads to great concern among scientists; we may once again return to the pre-antibiotic era, since all microbes will be resistant, not a single antibiotic will be able to act on them. Our careful actions have resulted in the fact that we will no longer use quite powerful drugs. It will be simply impossible to treat tuberculosis, AIDS, HIV, and malaria,” added Galina Kholmogorova.
That is why when treating with antibiotics it is necessary to be quite responsible and follow the following rules:
- you cannot take them without the advice of doctors;
- do not stop the started course of treatment;
- remember that they do not help with viral infections.
Sometimes it happens that a great discovery is made by someone who constantly breaks the rules. Thousands of doctors who kept their workplaces clean could not do what the sloppy Alexander Fleming managed to do - discover the world's first antibiotic. And here’s what’s interesting: if he had kept himself clean, he wouldn’t have succeeded either.
Long ago, the great French chemist Claude-Louis Berthollet very wittily remarked: “Dirt is a substance out of place.” Indeed, as soon as something is not where it should be, a mess immediately appears in the room. And since it is very inconvenient both for work and for normal life, everyone is taught from childhood that they should clean more often. Otherwise, the amount of substance that is not in its place will exceed that which knows its place.
Particularly intolerant of dirt medical workers. And they can be understood - a substance “out of place” quickly becomes a place of residence for various microorganisms. And they are very dangerous for the health of both patients and doctors themselves. Perhaps this is why most doctors are pathological cleaners. However, it is possible that in this profession there is a kind of artificial selection - the doctor who constantly “puts” substances in the wrong place loses clientele and the respect of colleagues and does not stay in the profession.
However, artificial selection, like its natural namesake, sometimes goes wrong. It happens that a dirty doctor brings humanity where more benefit than its neat counterparts. It is about such a funny paradox and we'll talk— about how a doctor’s sloppiness once saved the lives of millions of people. However, let's talk about everything in order.
On August 6, 1881, in the Scottish city of Darvel, a boy was born into the Fleming family of farmers, who was named Alexander. Since childhood, the child was distinguished by curiosity and dragged everything that he considered interesting from the street into the house. His parents, however, were not annoyed by this, but they were very upset that their offspring never put his trophies in a certain place. Young naturalist I scattered dried insects, herbariums, minerals and more dangerous things around the house. In a word, no matter how they tried to accustom Alexander to order and cleanliness, nothing came of it.
After some time, Fleming entered medical school at St. Mary's Hospital. There Alexander studied surgery and, having passed the exams, became a member of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1906. While remaining employed in the pathology laboratory of Professor Almroth Wright at St Mary's Hospital, he received his MSc and BS degrees from the University of London in 1908. It should be noted that medical practice was not particularly interested in Fleming - he was much more attracted to research activities.
Alexander’s colleagues repeatedly noted that even in the laboratory he was simply monstrously sloppy. And it was dangerous to enter his office - reagents, medicines and instruments were scattered everywhere, and if you sat down on a chair, you could run into a scalpel or tweezers. Fleming was constantly reprimanded and reprimanded by his senior colleagues for having everything in the wrong place, but it did not seem to bother him too much.
When did the first one begin? World War, a young doctor went to the front in France. There he, working in field hospitals, began studying infections that penetrated wounds and caused severe consequences. And already at the beginning of 1915, Fleming presented a report that described the presence of types of microbes in wounds, some of which were not yet familiar to most bacteriologists. He also managed to find out that the use of antiseptics for several hours after injury does not completely destroy bacterial infections, although many surgeons thought so. Moreover, the most harmful microorganisms penetrated the wounds so deeply that it was impossible to destroy them with simple antiseptic treatment.
What should be done in such cases? The possibility of treating such infections with traditional medicines from inorganic substances Fleming did not particularly believe it - his pre-war studies of therapy for syphilis showed that these methods were very unreliable. However, Alexander was carried away by the ideas of his boss, Professor Wright, who considered the use of antiseptics to be a dead end, since they weaken the protective properties of the body itself. But if you receive drugs that will stimulate the immune system, the patient will be able to destroy his “offenders” himself.
Developing the thought of his colleague, Fleming suggested that he himself human body must contain substances that kill microbes (it should be noted that they didn’t really know anything about antibodies at that time; they were isolated only in 1939). He was able to confirm his hypothesis experimentally only after the war using the “slide cell” technique. The technique made it easy to show that when microbes enter the blood, leukocytes have a very strong bactericidal effect, and when antiseptics are added, the effect is significantly reduced or even completely eliminated.
So, encouraged, Fleming began experimenting with various body fluids. He watered bacterial cultures with them and analyzed the results. In 1922, a scientist, having caught a cold, blew his nose as a joke into a Petri dish where a bacterial culture was growing Micrococcuslysodeicticus. However, this joke led to a discovery - all the microbes died, and Fleming managed to isolate the substance lysozyme, which has an antibacterial effect.
Fleming continued to study this natural antiseptic, but it soon became clear that lysozyme is harmless for most pathogenic bacteria. However, the scientist did not give up and repeated the experiments. The most interesting thing is that Alexander, working with cultures of the most dangerous microorganisms, did not change his habits at all. His desk was still littered with Petri dishes that had not been washed or sterilized for weeks. Colleagues were afraid to enter his office, but the slovenly doctor did not seem to be at all frightened by the prospect of contracting a serious illness.
And now, seven years later, luck smiled at the researcher again. In 1928, Fleming began researching the properties of staphylococci. At first, the work did not bring the expected results and the doctor decided to take a vacation at the end of the summer. However, he didn't even think about cleaning his laboratory. So, Fleming went on vacation without washing the Petri dishes, and when he returned on September 3, he noticed that mold fungi had appeared in one dish with the cultures, and the colonies of staphylococci present there had died, while the other colonies were normal.
Intrigued, Fleming showed the mushroom-contaminated cultures to his former assistant Merlin Price, who said: “That’s how you discovered lysozyme,” which should not be taken as admiration, but as a reproach for sloppiness. Having identified the fungi, the scientist realized that the antibacterial substance was produced by a representative of the species Penicillium notatum, which fell on the culture of staphylococci completely by accident. A few months later, on March 7, 1929, Fleming isolated a mysterious antiseptic substance and named it penicillin. Thus began the era of antibiotics - drugs that suppress bacterial and fungal infections.
And what’s interesting is that before Fleming, many scientists came quite close to the discovery of such substances. In the USSR, for example, Georgy Frantsevich Gause was just one step away from receiving antibiotics. There have been breakthroughs on this front by scientists from the USA and many European countries. However, no one got their hands on this mysterious substance. This probably happened because they were all adherents of cleanliness and sterility, and mold Penicillium notatum I just couldn’t get into their laboratories. And in order to reveal the secret of penicillin, it took the dirty and slobby Alexander Fleming.
