THE DEVELOPMENT OF PENICILLIN IN MEDICINE! 
By H. W. Ftorry and EH. CHain 
Ozford University 
Discovery of the chemotherapeutic effects of penicillin has excited 
widespread comment in the lay as well as the medical press. A first- 
hand account of how this substance was introduced into medicine 
may, therefore, be of interest. 
The phenomenon of the inhibition of the growth of one micro- 
organism by another has been known for more than 60 years, for 
Pasteur and Joubert in 1877 noted that anthrax bacilli were pre- 
vented from growing when certain other organisms were also present 
in the culture medium. To them is credited the first suggestion of 
using this antagonistic property of bacteria for curative purposes. 
Since this fundamental observation, many examples of the same 
phenomenon—called microbial antagonism—have been recorded. 
In many cases the inhibitory effect of one microbial species on another 
is due to metabolic products formed by the antagonist. These prod- 
ucts have recently been termed “antibiotics.” 
The earliest attempt to introduce antibiotics into medicine was 
made by Emmerich and Low in 1898. They extracted an impure 
material, which they termed “pyocyanase,” from old culture filtrates 
of Pseudomonas pyocyanea and showed that it had the property of 
causing death, or lysis, of some of the bacteria which can cause disease 
in man. They recommended pyocyanase for the local treatment of 
various infectious diseases, but it did not come into general use, 
although apparently it was on sale in Germany, until at least 1936. 
The only other serious attempt to utilize antibacterial products for 
combating infection in man has been the employment of gramicidin, 
obtained from cultures of Bacillus brevis. This powerful substance 
was discovered by Dubos in 1939, and although it is far too toxic to 
inject into the blood stream it can be used for application locally to 
infected wounds. 
In 1929 Alexander Fleming noticed that colonies of staphylococci 
growing onan agar plate were undergoing lysis in the neighborhood 
of a contaminating mold colony. Most bacteriologists would have 
1 Reprinted by permission from Hygcia, vol. 22, No. 4, April 1944. 
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