After testing scores of thousands of soil samples from all over the world, researchers for Charles Pfizer & Co. Inc. announced last week that they had isolated a new and promising antibiotic from a piece of Indiana dirt. The drug, named terramycin (earth mold) by its Brooklyn discoverers, is secreted by a tiny organism, Streptomyces rimosus, of the same group which has produced three other major antibiotics —streptomycin, aureomycin and Chloromycetin.
In the test tube and in laboratory animals, terramycin kills heavy growths of bacteria which cause one of the commonest forms of...