RP232 The Accidental Savior

 RP232 The Accidental Savior

Nowadays, if you cut your hand, you wash it with soap and water, put a bandage on it, and forget about it. You don't worry about developing a fatal infection. If you get a sore throat that doesn't go away, you go to the doctor and get an antibiotic. Minor illnesses don't scare us anymore, thanks to Alexander Fleming and his famous discovery—penicillin.

Before the 1940s, any infection could be fatal. Scarlet fever was a killer. Simple bacterial infections spread to the blood, bones, and brain, and easily turned deadly. Soldiers fighting in World War I feared gangrene (a wound infection) as much as enemy weapons.

Fleming had seen WWI soldiers die from infected wounds but also from dangerous, ineffective treatments. He was driven to find a cure for infections. In 1928, he was researching the bacteria staphylococcus. He went on vacation, leaving the petri dishes containing the bacteria in his laboratory. When he returned, one of them was contaminated with mold, and the mold had killed the surrounding bacteria!

Fleming spent the next twelve years studying that mold, from the genus Penicillium. It produced a chemical that killed many disease-causing bacteria. This substance was called "penicillin" by Fleming. Finally, Howard Florey and Ernst Chain, among many other scientists, helped create a substance that could be mass produced.

Governments saw how significant penicillin could be to the war effort and helped support its production. Scientists raced to produce penicillin knowing they could save thousands of soldiers' lives by killing infections in their wounds. Penicillin is sometimes seen as a secret weapon of WW II.

Even at home, away from the fighting, the demand for penicillin was instant. Lives changed almost overnight. The fear of death by a simple infection was erased, and many childhood illnesses became merely inconvenient, rather than life-or-death struggles. Today, we live without worrying that our next scratch or cough might be our last.