BESSEY: MYCOLOGY 245 



the study of the fungi that produces antibiotics. In my work as a plant patholo- 

 gist I had occasion frequently to work with Petri-dish cultures of bacteria or of 

 certain fungi. Occasionally my cultures were contaminated by the entrance of 

 spores of a Penicillium or Aspergillus. Very often around such a contaminant 

 the bacteria or fungi under culture were suppressed. I lacked the scientific 

 curiosity to try to learn why it happened. I was not alone in my stupidity; I 

 have talked with others who had the same experience. But there was one man, 

 an Englishman named Alexander Fleming, who noted the destruction of the 

 cells of a Staphylococcus around the contaminating colony of a species of Peni- 

 cillium. He did not throw away the contaminated culture or cut out the invader 

 while the colony was still small. He wanted to find out what was happening, 

 and why. That is how penicillin was discovered. If the rest of us had been as 

 keen as Fleming, penicillin could have been discovered decades earlier, for Na- 

 ture had given us the opportunity to observe this phenomenon. Even though 

 Fleming recognized the possible value of penicillin and tested it against various 

 pathogenic bacteria it was not until his Penicillium notatuyn Westl. was studied 

 by Florey and Heatley at Oxford University and sufficient penicillin was pro- 

 duced to permit clinical experiments on human beings that the danger was past 

 that this observation might be dropped from sight as merely an interesting 

 fact. But with the outbreak of World War II a cooperative project was estab- 

 lished in the United States, in which Florey and Heatley took part. Thus, as 

 shown by Kenneth B. Eaper in his presidential address before the Mycological 

 Society of America in 1951 (Raper, 1952), this international cooperation in- 

 volved discovery of improved methods for more production of penicillin and 

 development of improved strains of the fungus. So in the ten-year period from 

 the beginning of this project the monthly production of penicillin in America, 

 measured in "penicillin units," rose from 400,000,000 in May, 1941, to "between 

 23 and 33 trillion units" (23,000,000,000,000 and 33,000,000,000,000) ten years 

 later. The success of this cooperative project with the product of Penicillium 

 notatum started hundreds of investigators, independently and working for phar- 

 maceutical manufacturers, to test thousands of cultures of all sorts of fungi (in- 

 cluding Actinomycetes) and bacteria. The result is that more than three hun- 

 dred antibiotics have been discovered, of which about seven are now in mass 

 production and use. The search still goes on. The interested reader is referred 

 to the ponderous work of Florey et al. (1949), in addition to this sketchy outline. 



Periodicals 



One hundred years ago there was not a single scientific periodical devoted 

 solely to the publication of mycological contributions. Levcille published most 

 of his important papers in Annales des Sciences Naturelles, Botanique, the ma- 

 jority of De Bary's contributions appeared in BotaniscJie Zeitung of which he 

 was the editor in the later years of his life. Among other scientific journals in 

 which mycological papers appeared were Flora oder allgemeine Botanische Zei- 

 tung; Pringsheira's Jahrhiicher fur Wissenschaftliclie Botanik; Berichte der 

 Deutschen Botanischen Gesellschaft; Zeitschrift filr Botanik; Bulletin de la So- 

 ciete Botanique de France, Comptes Rendus; Annals of Botany; Nature; Broteria; 

 Nuovo Giornale Botanico Italico; Botanical Gazette; American Naturalist; Bui- 



