Antibiotics get the nod for best medical achievement of 19th-century
Many scientists argue that antibiotics was the single most impressive medical achievement of the last 20th Century. Alexander Fleming, at St. Mary’s Hospital in London, started the ball rolling in the 1920s with his discovery of a mold that killed staphylococci bacteria growing in a lab dish. He identified it as Penicillium rubrum.
Ten years later, Oxford scientists Sir Howard Florey and E. B. Chain came across Fleming’s write-up and set about purifying the key substance for controlling infectious disease. Appropriately labeled “a miracle drug,” penicillin was in plentiful supply to treat allied soldiers in the last years of World War II.
Antiseptic ointments from molds were used by the Chinese 2,500 years ago, but the full potential of antibiotics was not realized until the latter half of the 1900s. Within a few years the new class of medicines was able to provide a cure for such implacable killer diseases as tuberculosis, diphtheria, pneumonia, syphilis and tetanus.
Hundreds of antibiotics are now known, and 50 or more are used by doctors today. Most work in one of several possible ways: those like penicillin attack the cell membranes of bacteria; others, like the sulfonamides, interfere with cell metabolism of disease agents; still others, like the tetracyclines, disrupt the reproductive processes of bacteria.
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