A Head Full of Ideas / That Are Driving Me Insane OR: WonderDrugs

Categories: Science , Local Interest , Health & Nutrition

I need to be vague so a Major Corporation won't slap me with a SLAPP suit, but I used to be a contractor in the library there.  The library was right across from the large auditorium, and one day I noticed everyone from the [censored] wing of the building going in, which was not unusual.  But this time, it turned out that 300 [censored] were being told they would no longer have jobs with the Corporation in [censored] months, and that a certain kind of research would no longer take place there.  

Everyone took the news pretty well except for one guy who must have found out beforehand what was going on and refused to enter the auditorium.  He sat in one of the nice chairs by the library yelling things like, "It's a lot cheaper to hire a PR person than to invent a product that will keep someone's [censored] in their [censored] for their whole life!"

That's the man I want to marry, unless he already is married. 

One of my points here is that it's a good thing the companies involved with researching sulfa drugs and the even better antibiotics didn't drop out because the research involved was expensive.

It used to be that for a Feel-Good book, you couldn't beat the Wonder Drug story.  Penicillin, for example, was around by the end of World War II, and many soldiers who would have died of infection during World War I, not to mention the American Civil War, recovered due to penicillin. 

The library is crawling with books about sulfa drugs and antibiotics, but the ones on the shelves (rather than down in storage) are generally not as cheery anymore, what with the concern that misuse of these drugs will eventually cause them to become ineffective. Penicillin was available over the counter until the '50s, and we all know the temptation to stop taking it after our initial symptoms abate.

Alexander Fleming gets the credit, but in fact he was unable to turn the penicillium notatum mold into a useable product.  Howard Foley, Michael Chain, professors at Oxford University, as well as Fleming, eventually won the Nobel prize for the discovery, but it took Big Pharma in Peoria and in Australia to create enough of the substance to treat the suppurating infections (I'm trying to avoid saying "pus") of the military and the civilian population.  

By the way, Fleming was known for his bacteria art, which is colorless when first created but becomes brightly colored as the cultures develop.  He had an exhibition of his artwork that was attended by Queen Mary, who was not amused, even though his subjects were more realistic and patriotic than the example above--a Union Jack and a mother and child, for example.

The USDA Northern Regional Research Laboratory in Peoria was hugely helpful, and because science is hard, had I been employed by the penicillin team, I would like to have been the woman sent around to grocery stores every day to buy moldy foods to test for the penicillium notatum mold.  Eventually she found a cantaloupe so foul that it became the mother of most penicillin found in the U.S.

As with all teams, Fleming, Foley, and Chain ended up not on speaking terms.  Foley felt Fleming was taking all the credit for the discovery, and Chain was ticked off when Foley took another team member with him to Peoria.

The scariest thing about writing this blog was that after reading one book, I felt ready to start writing--and then I read a couple more and realized I would be promulgating bad facts.  You need to read more than one book and also to look in the online catalog, because some of the most interesting information is not on the shelves.

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The man at the Corporation calmed down a little and shouted sensibly, 'When the boss says everyone on the team should wear a red tie to promote team unity, is the smarter person the one who refuses to do it because it's stupid?  Or the one who realizes it's just part of the game and wears the tie.  Who's going to be promoted first?"

I've never forgotten him.  Also remember that antibiotics don't work at all on viruses like Ebola or guinea worm disease.