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On 12 February 1941, a British police officer, Albert Alexander, received the first penicillin treatment in history at Oxford Public Hospital, England. After being cut with a rose, the wound became severely infected. Evicted, the police agreed to an experimental penicillin treatment, but the doses were barely reached for five days. When the medicine was finished, the patient got worse and died. However, with this patient began the revolutionary ‘era of antibiotics’, which forever changed the history of medicine.
At a time when the world is witnessing a global vaccination against Covid-19, it must be remembered that 80 years ago the first penicillin treatment was carried out in a human being.
A 43-year-old British policeman, Albert Alexander, was the first patient to be treated with penicillin. His doctor at Radcliff Hospital in Oxford, England, after seeing him in a dying state, offered him experimental treatment. It was a matter of exhausting the last resort, as Alexander had been evicted after an infection by a cut put him on the verge of death. So on February 12, 1941, Dr. Charles Fletcher treated him with penicillin and marked a milestone in history.
And it is that previously in the 1940s, humanity was prone to die by a simple cut that was then infected by bacterial growth. A badly treated wound from time immemorial could have meant death.
Alexander Fleming discovered the Hong ‘Penicillium notatum’
On September 28, 1928, a doctor of Scottish descent, Alexander Fleming, returned from his month-long vacation to work in his laboratory at St. John’s Hospital. Mary of London, when she observed that one of the bacteria cultures in petri dishes was contaminated by a fungus. So, aided by one of his colleagues, and by the use of the microscope, he realized that around this mold was a halo of transparency, a cell death where bacteria did not grow. .
Fleming’s valuable discovery earned him the Nobel Prize in Medicine 17 years later. An award he shared with Howard Florey, a pathology teacher at Sir School. William Dunn of Oxford University and Ernst Chain, a German chemist of Jewish descent. Both resumed research on penicillin, which Alexander Fleming had dismissed in 1934, after finding serious obstacles to both purification and antibiotic synthesis.
In 1939, the work of Howard Florey and Ernst Chain, in addition to that of the British biologist Norman Heatley, was successful. They were able to stabilize and purify penicillin in 1939. But just that year, World War II broke out, the war conflict, which with more than 50 million deaths, is the deadliest in the history of the humanity. The devastating campaign of Nazi Germany, put Europe in check, already millions of soldiers on battlefields suffering agonizing diseases due to infections. Bullet fire, cracking and bombing produced large numbers of casualties who were left to their own devices if the wound did not progress. Against this background, in May 1940, the Oxford group in England decided to accelerate the production of penicillin.
The first experiments of Howard Florey and Ernst Chain in 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 them surviving, while the others did not.
The positive test encouraged scientists to experiment with humans. But purified penicillin was an expensive treatment. It was one thing to administer in mice, and another in humans. Despite the difficulty of the business, they set it up at the Oxford School of Pathology by arranging tubs, drums, vases, and other concave spaces in which to purify.
This happened on February 12, 1941, 80 years ago, when Albert Alexander was first injected with police penicillin. The wound from a cut with a rose, had affected Alexander’s face and the infection had spread to his lungs. Faced with the urgency of a treatment, he accepted penicillin with such good results that he showed improvements the next day, but purified penicillin for one year only got it for 5 days.
Despite the death in March of Albert Alexander, but convinced of the achievement, the Oxford group sought to produce penicillin on a large scale by knocking on doors in the UK chemical industry. However, war prevailed and the industry was not risked by the pharmaceutical company. The Oxford group had no choice but to emigrate to the United States, specifically to Peoria Laboratories, Illinois.
The mass development of penicillin that changed the course of humanity
There, the British biologist Norman Heatley and the American microbiologist Andrew Moyer, managed to multiply by a tenth the amount of antibiotics they obtained from the fermentation process of penicillin. This led to mass production and sale in the form of blisters by 1943. Immense aid to Allied soldiers in World War II.
Since the mid-1940s, penicillin has changed the course of disease in the world. Laboratories in the United States and the United Kingdom lined up their drugs for synthesis, about to be administered orally. From now on, sexual 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 credited with discovering penicillin, behind his production were great efforts by Howard Florey, Ernst Chain, Norman Heatley, and several other scientists from the University of Pathology School. ‘Oxford, work was crucial in laying the groundwork for the hopeful‘ era of antibiotics ’. The same hope that the world puts in vaccines against Covid19.