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Under the Sea Wind

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The modern history of penicillin research begins in earnest in the 1870s, in the United Kingdom. Sir John Scott Burdon-Sanderson, who started out at St. Mary's Hospital (1852–1858) and later worked there as a lecturer (1854–1862), observed that culture fluid covered with mold would produce no bacterial growth. Burdon-Sanderson's discovery prompted Joseph Lister, an English surgeon and the father of modern antisepsis, to discover in 1871 that urine samples contaminated with mold also did not permit the growth of bacteria. Lister also described the antibacterial action on human tissue of a species of mold he called Penicillium glaucum. A nurse at King's College Hospital whose wounds did not respond to any traditional antiseptic was then given another substance that cured her, and Lister's registrar informed her that it was called Penicillium. In 1874, the Welsh physician William Roberts, who later coined the term "enzyme", observed that bacterial contamination is generally absent in laboratory cultures of Penicillium glaucum. John Tyndall followed up on Burdon-Sanderson's work and demonstrated to the Royal Society in 1875 the antibacterial action of the Penicillium fungus. By this time, Bacillus anthracis had been shown to cause anthrax, the first demonstration that a specific bacterium caused a specific disease.

In 1877, French biologists Louis Pasteur and Jules Francois Joubert observed that cultures of the anthrax bacilli, when contaminated with molds, could be successfully inhibited. Some references say that Pasteur identified the strain as Penicillium notatum. However, Paul de Kruif's 1926 Microbe Hunters describes this incident as contamination by other bacteria rather than by mold. In 1887, Garré found similar results. In 1895, Vincenzo Tiberio, an Italian physician at the University of Naples, published research about a mold in a water well in Arzano that showed antibacterial action.

Two years later, Ernest Duchesne at École du Service de Santé Militaire in Lyon independently discovered the healing properties of a Penicillium glaucum mold, even curing infected guinea pigs of typhoid. He published a dissertation in 1897 but it was ignored by the Institut Pasteur. Duchesne was himself using a discovery made earlier by Arab stable boys, who used molds to cure sores on horses. He did not claim that the mold contained any antibacterial substance, only that the mold somehow protected the animals. The penicillin isolated by Fleming does not cure typhoid and so it remains unknown which substance might have responsible for Duchesne's cure.

In Belgium in 1920, Andre Gratia and Sara Dath observed a fungal contamination in one of their Staphylococcus aureus cultures that was inhibiting the growth of the bacterium. They identified the fungus as a species of Penicillium and presented their observations as a paper, but it received little attention. An Institut Pasteur scientist, Costa Rican Clodomiro Picado Twight, similarly recorded the antibiotic effect of Penicillium in 1923.

Specific species of Penicillium are difficult to identify in the early stages of penicillin research, because most species were generally referred to as Penicillium glaucum and no documentation was made that allowed the specific strain to be identified. Thus, it is difficult to tell whether penicillin actually prevented bacterial growth. ~