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On February 12, 1941, a British police officer, Albert Alexander, received the first penicillin treatment in history at a public hospital in Oxford, England. After being cut with a rose, the wound became seriously infected. Evacuated, the policeman accepted an experimental treatment with penicillin, but the doses barely lasted five days. After the medication was stopped, the patient got worse and died. However, with this patient began the revolutionary “antibiotic era,” which changed the history of medicine forever.
At a time when the world is witnessing a global vaccination against Covid-19, it must be remembered that 80 years ago the first treatment with penicillin was performed on a human being.
A 43-year-old British police officer, Albert Alexander, was the first patient to be treated with penicillin. His doctor at Radcliff Hospital in Oxford, England, after seeing him in a state of death, offered him experimental treatment. It was the exhaustion of the last solution, because Alexander had been evacuated after an infection from a cut put him on the verge of death. So, on February 12, 1941, Dr. Charles Fletcher treated him with penicillin and marked an important milestone in history.
And before the 1940s, mankind was prone to death from a simple cut that was later infected by the growth of bacteria. A badly treated wound from time immemorial could mean death.
Alexander Fleming discovered Hong “Penicillium notatum”
On September 28, 1928, a Scottish-born physician, Alexander Fleming, returned from a month-long vacation to work in his laboratory at St. John’s Hospital. Mary in London, when she noticed that one of the bacterial cultures in the Petri dishes was contaminated with a fungus. So, with the help of one of his colleagues and using a microscope, he realized that around this mold there was a halo of transparency, a cell death in which bacteria do not grow.
Fleming’s valuable discovery brought him the Nobel Prize in Medicine 17 years later. An award he shared with Howard Florey, a pathology professor at Sir. William Dunn of Oxford University and Ernst Chain, a German chemist of Jewish descent. Both resumed research on penicillin, which Alexander Fleming had rejected in 1934, after encountering serious obstacles to both purification and antibiotic synthesis.
In 1939, the work of Howard Florey and Ernst Chain, added to that of the British biologist Norman Heatley, was successful. They managed to stabilize and purify penicillin in 1939. But it was in that year that World War II broke out, which, with over 50 million deaths, is the deadliest in human history. The devastating campaign of Nazi Germany put Europe in control and millions of soldiers on the battlefields suffered from agonizing diseases caused by infections. Bullet attacks, splinters and bombings resulted in a large number of casualties who were left to their own devices if the wound did not progress. Faced with such a scenario, in May 1940, the Oxford group in England decided to accelerate penicillin production.
Howard Florey and Ernst Chain’s early experiments on mice and humans
The first experiments were performed with laboratory mice. They inoculated eight with streptococci, a deadly bacterium. Of these eight, four rodents were injected with penicillin, resulting in their survival, while the others did not.
The positive test encouraged scientists to experiment with humans. But purified penicillin was a wasteful treatment. One thing was given to mice and another to humans. Despite the company’s difficulty, they started it at the Oxford School of Pathology, arranging tubs, drums, vases and other concave spaces in which to purify it.
Thus came February 12, 1941, 80 years ago, when police officer Albert Alexander was first injected with penicillin. The wound from a rose cut had affected Alexander’s face and the infection had spread to his lungs. Faced with the urgency of treatment, he accepted penicillin with such good results that he showed improvements the next day, but purified penicillin for a year lasted only 5 days.
Despite the death of Albert Alexander in March, but convinced of the achievement, the Oxford group tried to produce penicillin on a large scale, knocking on doors in the chemical industry in Great Britain. However, the war prevailed and the industry did not take risks for the pharmaceutical company. The Oxford Group had no choice but to emigrate to the United States, especially to Peoria Laboratories in Illinois.
The mass development of penicillin that changed the course of mankind
There, the British biologist Norman Heatley and the American microbiologist Andrew Moyer, managed to multiply the amount of antibiotics obtained from the fermentation process of penicillin by a dozen. This led to mass production and sale in the form of ampoules until 1943. A huge help to Allied soldiers in World War II.
Since the mid-1940s, penicillin has changed the course of disease around the world. Laboratories in the United States and the United Kingdom have turned to their drugs for synthesis, to the point of oral administration. Further, sexually transmitted diseases such as gonorrhea or syphilis; skin wounds; and respiratory diseases, such as bronchitis, pharyngitis, and pneumonia, could be cured with penicillin.
And although Alexander Fleming is considered the discoverer of penicillin, behind his production were the great efforts of Howard Florey, Ernst Chain, Norman Heatley and a few other scientists at the University of Oxford School of Pathology, whose work was crucial to to lay the foundations of the hopeful “antibiotic age”. The same hope that the world puts in vaccines against Covid19.