Antibiotics history

Sir Alexander Fleming

Antibiotics are a kind of drugs extracted from microorganisms to protect from harmful bacteria. Antibiotics have certain things that intercross with attacking bacteria, kill them or inhibit their reproduction. In human organism antibiotics play a role of amunition.

People have used antibiotics for hundred of years, not actually knowing their potential. But officially antibiotics were discovered in 1920’s by a chemist Alexander Fleming. He noticed that some substances, such as Penicillium, restrain the evolution of bacteria, and that was the beginning of antibiotic age.

Since that time antibiotics are widely used all over the world as a strong remedy against bacterial illnesses. A lot of different types of these powerful weapons are already discovered. But there are also antibiotics that are harmful for a human organism, despite their effectiveness. Earlier the antibiotics were natural, generated by good bacteria. Nowadays we usually deal with synthesized antibiotics. Still, antibiotic materials are derived from good bacteria that can combat harmful ones.

Mold and soil organisms were grown to accumulate the first coarse examples of antibiotics. Trading companies still grow them for antibiotic production. Making their first steps in producing antibiotics, researchers used containers of all sorts and kinds to grow large amounts of bacteria. Later on beer brewing equipment was used for those purposes. Nowadays the technologies go further, large fermentation cells with liquid work instead of that old beer brewing mechanism. The scientists faced also a number of problems, for example, how to purify antibiotics from different admixtures. As chambers released antibiotics, they went through a number of other processes, the result of which were impure antibiotic examples. It was Rene Dubos who solved this problem brilliantly, despite all the difficulty of the process. He was the first to isolate gramicidin.

Alexander Fleming and Rene Dubos gained the Nobel Prize for Medicine as organic chemists which discovered penicillin.

The meaning of antibiotics is immense, if we speak about their effectuality against harmful bacteria. The discovery of penicillin helped to save at least 300,000 lives during the Second World War. Without having antibiotics a lot of people would be now suffering strongly from diseases, caused harmful bacteria.

Taken from: http://www.ma-hc.com/originhistory.htm