Stephen Covey, the renowned author of ‘The Seven Habits’ series, says “Interdependent people combine their own efforts, with the efforts of others to achieve their greatest success.” Penicillin is a wonder drug of the 20th century. The discovery of penicillin is a historical landmark, which has opened up new avenues in the field of antibiotics against life-threatening bacterial infections, serious injuries, and deadly wounds. Alexander Fleming’s pioneering work on penicillin cemented a way for the discovery of this miraculous drug against fatal infectious diseases which had no impeccable therapy at that time.
The journey of penicillin discovery is an awe-inspiring story in which every contributor, which included scientists, coworkers, and manufacturers, did incredible work to make an unexpected dream come true. On 3 September 1930, Alexander Fleming returned to his laboratory at St Mary’s Hospital in London after holidays. While cleaning his laboratory, he observed that a petri dish of bacteria, Staphylococcus aureus, had been contaminated with a blue-green mould. The area around the mould was clear of any bacterial growth. Fleming assumed that the fungal mould, Penicillium notatum, must have secreted something valuable which was responsible for killing the bacteria. To isolate effective molecule from the mould, Fleming assigned this task to his assistant Stuart Craddock and Frederick Ridley. However, it was proved to be rather challenging to isolate the active chemical with the available facilities at that time. They could only manage to produce a crude mixture of the active compound, later called penicillin. In 1929, Fleming published his results in a British Journal describing, for the first time, a crude mixture of penicillin as a potential antibacterial remedy. These efforts, although not successful in isolating the active ingredient itself, flagged a way for the treatment of deadly bacterial diseases. Further attempts to isolate penicillin, by Professor Harold Raistrick at London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, also proved fruitless.
This story remained untold until 1939, when a team headed by Professor Howard Florey, which included Dr. Ernst Chain among other colleagues at School of Pathology, Oxford University started afresh the work on penicillin, and undertook the crucial task of subsequent animal experimentations, even though it was war-time and carrying out such task was quite challenging. To get sufficient amount of penicillin, they needed to process a large amount of mould filtrate, up to 500 litres per week. Meanwhile, they also invented new and improved ways of mould cultivation, isolation, and purification. They also hired a team at £2 per week wages, later called penicillin girls, for assisting in the process. Soon the whole Oxford laboratory started to resemble a penicillin production factory. At long last, a biochemist, Norman Heatley, became successful in isolating pure penicillin. Later Edward Abraham purified it by using a certain purification technique for use in clinical trials.
After successful purification of penicillin, a crucial experiment on humans was carried out with 43-year-old policeman Albert Alexander in 1941, who got his mouth scratched during a trivial task of trimming the roses. The drug showed incredible results in wound recovery, but due to the limited supply of penicillin, he could not survive and died in the next few days. Nevertheless, this vital experiment gave much-needed hope to the scientists to continue their research in countering harmful bacteria. As this was the formidable time of on-going World War II, it was quite daunting, if not impossible, to carry out work on the production of penicillin on a much larger scale in order to fulfil the needs for further drug development and its subsequent marketing.
In the summer of 1941, with the growing need of penicillin in bulk amount to continue their research, and also due to the war-time difficulties associated with the bulk production of penicillin in Europe, Professor Florey, along with his colleague Norman Heatley, made a historic journey to the USA to visit different pharmaceutical industries in order to surge penicillin production. They met a number of different people and tried to convince them of penicillin’s miraculous results against life-threatening bacterial diseases. They achieved their first success when the scientists from Northern Regional Research Laboratory (NRRL) in Peoria, Illinois showed an interest in penicillin’s antibacterial properties. The director NRRL, Orville May, agreed to start the program rigorously for large production of penicillin.
Later on, scientists at NRRL identified some new strains that produced penicillin in a much larger quantity than that obtained from the old mould culture. Through these pioneering efforts, the world eventually became interested in this antibacterial agent, and many internationally recognised companies such as Merck, Squibb, Lilly and Pfizer expressed interest as well. All these efforts finally seem to bear fruit when in 1942 Mrs. Ann Miller became the first person to be successfully treated with this miraculous drug; the success was followed by treatment of ten more patients, each time a success story.
The development of this miraculous drug, penicillin, involving a chain of dedicated members, set a historic example for accomplishing difficult tasks with team efforts, even in difficult wartime. Such examples reveal the basic sense of humanity and the resulting dedication for a noble cause. This is reflected in Albert Elder’s historic words to the penicillin manufacturers in 1943, “You are urged to impress upon every worker in your plant that penicillin produced today will be saving the life of someone in a few days or curing the disease of someone now incapacitated. Put up slogans in your plant! Place notices in pay envelopes! Create an enthusiasm for the job down to the lowest worker in your plant.” The three key contributors, Sir Alexander Fleming, Ernst Boris Chain, and Sir Howard Walter Florey, received the Nobel Prize for their efforts and services to humanity.
There are many valuable lessons to be learned from this well-known story of penicillin discovery; chief among them is that with relentless efforts of a team, dedicated to achieving a noble cause, great things can indeed be accomplished, even under seemingly impossible circumstances. In our country we have great minds in every field, if I speak especially about political parties, then we can easily see many outstanding visionaries who have the potential to lead the country towards development and prosperity. Why not put them together in a single team to set directions and define policies under the flag of a single national agenda for a prosperous country rather than the present state of affairs which involves them constantly criticising each other? In such difficult times, when we have many complications and threatening issues, political forces need to move forward hand-in-hand for the greater benefit of this country. A team of dedicated people from diverse disciplines can indeed lead to a prosperous and prevailing Pakistan.
The writer is an Assistant Professor at ICCBS, HEJ, Research Institute of Chemistry. He can be reached at [email protected]