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By 1938 when World War II loomed, a good internal and external antiseptic was still to seek. But at Oxford's Sir William Dunn School of Pathology, the man who was to make Dr. Fleming's discovery save human lives was already at work on the problem. He was Dr. Howard Walter Florey, 45, an Australian-born professor of pathology.
At first, Dr. Florey's researchers got only about a gram of reddish-brown powder (the sodium salt of penicillin) from 100 liters of the mold liquid. But at last, after heroic chemical cookery, they accumulated enough penicillin to test the drug on living creatures.
Eight mice were inoculated with a deadly strain of streptococci. Says Dr. Florey: "We sat up through the night injecting penicillin every three hours into the treated group [four mice]. I must confess that it was one of the more exciting moments when we found in the morning that all the untreated mice were dead and all the penicillin-treated ones alive." The first human guinea pig was a policeman dying of staphylococcus septicemia (blood infection). After five days on penicillin, he "felt much improved."
Last year penicillin patients were still rare enough to be front-page news. First such case was two-year-old Patricia Malone of Jackson Heights, Queens. The New York Journal-American, which begged enough penicillin to save her life from staphylococcic septicemia, last week won the Pulitzer Prize for the story. After that, the nation watched one "hopeless" case after another get well.
Penicillin is already big business, yet Dr. Fleming (who discovered it) and Dr. Florey (who made it tick) have got nothing out of it but praise—doctors generally do not patent drugs. To Dr. Fleming, whose pioneer mind has reverted to watching and waiting, penicillin is not an end, but a beginning. There are at least 100,000 molds and fungi, any one of which may one day yield a drug with which to cure the many plagues penicillin leaves untouched. "It would be strange indeed," says Dr. Fleming, who is hard at work on other antibiotics, "if the first one described remained the best."
* They will get the drug from 21 manufacturers (two Canadian, the rest U.S.) now or soon to be in production. Manufacturers will make about 100 billion units in May, about 200 billion units by the end of the year. Prices now vary from $2.85 to $10 for 100,000 units (last year's price: $20).