First change:
On February 12, 1941, a British police officer, Albert Alexander, received the first penicillin treatment in history at the public hospital in Oxford, England. After cutting himself with a rose, the wound became seriously infected. Deported, the police officer accepted an experimental penicillin treatment, but the doses lasted barely five days. After the medication ended, the patient got worse and died. However, it was with this patient that the revolutionary “age of antibiotics” began, which changed the history of medicine forever.
At a time when the world is witnessing a worldwide vaccination against Covid-19, it should be remembered that 80 years ago, the first penicillin treatment was performed on a human.
A 43-year-old British police officer, Albert Alexander, was the first patient to be treated with penicillin. His doctor at Radcliff Hospital in Oxford, England, offered him experimental treatment after seeing him in a dying state. It was about exhausting the last resort, as Alexander had been expelled after an infection through a cut brought him to the brink of death. So on February 12, 1941, Dr. Charles Fletcher took him with penicillin and marked a milestone in history.
And it is that before the 1940s, humanity tended to die from a simple cut that was later infected by the growth of bacteria. A wound that has been mistreated since time immemorial can mean death.
Alexander Fleming Descubre el Hong ‘Penicillium notatum’
On September 28, 1928, the Scottish-born physician, Alexander Fleming, was returning from his month-long vacation to work in his laboratory at St. Mary’s Hospital in London when he noticed that one of the bacteria cultures in Petri dishes was contaminated with a fungus. So, aided by one of his colleagues, and using the microscope, he realized that around this mold was a halo of transparency, a cell death where bacteria did not grow.
Fleming’s valuable find earned him the Nobel Prize in Medicine 17 years later. An award he shared with Howard Florey, professor of pathology at Sir. William Dunn of Oxford University and Ernst Chain, a German chemist of Jewish descent. Both resumed research on penicillin that Alexander Fleming rejected in 1934, after encountering serious obstacles in both the purification and synthesis of the antibiotic.
In 1939 the work of Howard Florey and Ernst Chain, in addition to that of the British biologist Norman Heatley, was successful. They were able to stabilize and purify penicillin in 1939. But just that year, World War II broke out, the war that, with more than 50 million deaths, is the deadliest in human history. The devastating campaign of Nazi Germany put Europe in check, and millions of soldiers on battlefields suffered painful illnesses from infections. Bullets, splinters and bombings produced large numbers of casualties who were left to their own devices if the wound did not go further. Faced with such a scenario, the Oxford group in England decided in May 1940 to speed up penicillin production.
Howard Florey and Ernst Chain’s Early Experiments on Mice and Humans
The first experiments have been conducted with laboratory mice. They vaccinated eight of them with streptococci, a deadly bacterium. Of these eight, four rodents were injected with penicillin, which kept them alive, while the others did not.
The positive test encouraged scientists to experiment on humans. But purified penicillin was a wasteful treatment. It was one thing to administer to mice and another to humans. Despite the difficulty of the business, they started it at the Oxford School of Pathology, where they set up tubs, drums, vases and other hollow spaces to purify it.
Thus came February 12, 1941, 80 years ago, when police officer Albert Alexander first received penicillin. The wound from a dandruff cut had affected Alexander’s face and the infection had spread to his lungs. Faced with the urgency of the treatment, he accepted penicillin with such good results that he presented improvements the next day, but the penicillin purified for a year lasted only 5 days.
Despite Albert Alexander’s death in March, but convinced of the achievement, the Oxford group tried to produce penicillin on a large scale by tapping into the British chemical industry. However, the war raged and the industry took no risk for the pharmaceutical company. The Oxford group had no choice but to immigrate to the United States, particularly the Peoria laboratories in Illinois.
The massive development of penicillin that changed the course of humanity
There, the British biologist Norman Heatley and the American microbiologist Andrew Moyer managed to multiply the amount of antibiotics obtained from the fermentation process of penicillin by a dozen. This led to mass production and sale in ampoule form in 1943. An enormous help for allied soldiers in WWII.
Since the mid-1940s, penicillin changed the course of the disease in the world. Laboratories in the United States and the United Kingdom turned to their drugs to synthesize it, to the point of oral administration. From now on sexual diseases such as gonorrhea or syphilis; wounds on the skin; and respiratory diseases such as bronchitis, pharyngitis and pneumonia could be cured with penicillin.
And while Alexander Fleming is believed to be the discoverer of penicillin, behind its production there were great efforts from Howard Florey, Ernst Chain, Norman Heatley and several other scientists from the University of Oxford School of Pathology, whose work was crucial to laying the foundation of the hopeful ‘age of antibiotics’. The same hope the world brings against Covid19.