244 Miracles Ahead! 



similar wound studies in ten general Army hospitals." The use 

 of penicillin on venereal disease will be tested in six other mili- 

 tary hospitals. 



The production of penicillin from mold, however, is a dif- 

 ficult and space-consuming operation, and until the problem 

 of large-scale production is solved the limited supply avail- 

 able will go almost entirely to the Army and Navy. A small 

 amount is being used in a series of controlled tests in twenty 

 civilian hospitals. 



Production problems were discussed by Dr. A. N. Richards, 

 chairman of the Committee on Medical Research. 



"The difficulties which confront large-scale production," 

 he said, "arise chiefly from the fact that in the metabolism of 

 the mold only very minute amounts of penicillin are formed, 

 and those only after days of growth. 



"A yield of as much as one gram [about three-hundredths 

 of an ounce] of the purified product from 20 liters [a liter is 

 about a quart] of culture fluid would be regarded as excep- 

 tionally high." * 



But if chemists are able to take penicillin apart and see what 

 it is made of they may be able to synthesize it in the labora- 

 tory. This would make available larger amounts of this valu- 

 able drug at low cost. Scientists have been working on this 

 problem for several years, and a recent article in the British 

 Journal of Experimental Pathology indicates that penicillin 

 may be a complex member of the very large coal-tar group of 

 compounds. Thus penicillin may eventually be synthesized 

 from coal-tar compounds. 



1 A method that makes penicillin available to a much larger number of 

 civilian patients was reported in Science, official organ of the American 

 Association for the Advancement of Science, by Dr. George H. Robinson 

 and Dr. James E. Wallace of the Allegheny General Hospital, Pittsburgh, 

 Pa. The new method consists of applying gauze saturated with the living 

 green mold to the patients infection, thus allowing the mold to manufac- 

 ture its penicillin directly on the site of the infection. 



