BOTANICAL VIEW OF ANTIBIOTICS — ^JONES 371 



Avas grown on the surface of liquids in quart milk bottles. For each 

 batch of penicillin, several thousand bottles had to have their con- 

 tents separately inoculated, incubated, and harvested. No wonder 

 "practical people" despaired of the antibiotic ever coming into mass 

 production. Then, some ingenious person had the idea of using, in- 

 stead of quart milk bottles, 15,000 gallon tanks upended, through 

 which sterilized compressed air gushed. The tanks w'ere practically 

 teemmg with mold submerged in corn steep liquor. Soon penicillin 

 was turned out in carload lots, and the production cost was less than 

 that of packaging. Sir Alexander Fleming refused all patent rights 

 on penicillin ! 



Professor Selman Waksman was the discoverer of the second anti- 

 biotic to come into widespread use, streptomycin. Its name stems 

 from Streptonvyces^ the genus on which Waksman earned his master 

 of science degree at Rutgers in 1916. He systematically tested each 

 of some 10,000 separate cultures for antibiotic production. To stu- 

 dents of lower plants, the fact that most of these isolates of Strepto- 

 myces possessed antibiotic properties was probably a more important 

 datum than that one, StreiJtoinyces griseus, yielded the valuable strep- 

 tomycin. It became apparent that soil organisms, particularly the 

 genus Streptomyces, held high promise for future exploitation. Anti- 

 biotics from true bacteria turned out to be dreadfully toxic to man 

 in many instances. 



The next major antibiotic, Chloromycetin, was isolated from a 

 uew species of Streptomyces in 1947. It was announced by a group 

 of researchers emj^loyed in the Detroit laboratories of Parke, Davis 

 and Company, working in collaboration with Professor Paul R. 

 Burkholder, then chairman of the Department of Botany at Yale 

 University, and Professor David Gottlieb of the Department of Plant 

 Pathology at the University of Illinois. Burkholder isolated the 

 organism from soil collected in a mulched field near Caracas, Vene- 

 zuela, so that it was accordingly named Streptomyces venezuelae. At 

 about the same time, Gottlieb obtained it from a soil sample taken 

 from the campus in Urbana. Students of these lowly plants are 

 aware of the fact that they occur quite generally in soils but particu- 

 lar variants, producing useful antibiotics, may be rather localized, 

 so that it pays to explore over a wide geographic range. This is a 

 tolerable idea to botanists, W'ho are prone to wander and collect speci- 

 mens, other than soil samples. The new antibiotic was named 

 Chloromycetin. This name w^as retained as a trademark by Parke, 

 Davis and Company, but the substance w^as later given the nonpro- 

 prietary name, chloramphenicol. Its discovery aroused great interest, 

 as it was active against a relatively wide range of infectious agents, 

 including the bacteria of typhoid and undulant fever, various rick- 

 ettsiae, and the larger viruses, including that of scrub typhus. The 



