Medicine: Humble Beginnings

Since the discovery of mold-grown penicillin 20 years ago, most researchers have done their looking for new antibiotics in other molds. But apparently many new wonder drugs were hiding in many other unlikely places. Dr. John Robert Brown, of the University of Texas Medical Branch, has reported (in Texas Reports on Biology and Medicine) that he has extracted an antibiotic (thus far unproved) from ragweed. Last week, at a National Institute of Health symposium in Washington, new germ killers were reported from other strange sources:

¶Hop cones (the part used in making beer) produced two promising antibiotics, said Dr. W. D. Maclay, of the Western Regional Research Laboratory in Albany, Calif. One, called “lupulon,” seemed to be as effective as streptomycin against tuberculosis in mice; its hop-twin, “humulon,” worked in the test tube against T.B.

¶Sweet potato stems and leaves, reported Department of Agriculture researchers at Beltsville, Md., also produced two antibiotics. One worked against Staphylococcus aureus, the germ that causes boils; the other against fungi that damage plants. In the skins and pulps of ripe bananas, there were two more: one worked against Tinea trychophytina, the fungus that causes athlete’s foot, the other against the fungus that makes tomato plants wilt.