How to discover an antibiotic: a historian's guide | Vanessa Heggie

Given our pressing need for new antibiotics, or a whole new class of antibiotic-like drugs, perhaps we ought to try learning lessons from the history of penicillin (it might even help someone win the new Longitude Prize!)Historians of science and medicine are often terrible killjoys when it comes to great stories about discovery and genius. We've been quick to point out that the apocryphal story of Fleming discovering penicillin mould 'by accident' when it blew in through a window and landed on a discarded petri dish is, well, apocryphal. We're less unanimous about the way penicillin became a drug. Although the 'Oxford Group', lead by Howard Florey and Ernst Chain developed the chemical extract as far as clinical trials, in the end it was American agricultural, pharmaceutical and military researchers who produced the first useful quantities of purified antibiotic, and who subsequently made the biggest profits from it. Scientists and historians will tell you that this shows what happens when British science is underfunded, or that it warns us how much war can retard or skew scientific research, or (as politicians at the time argued) that it shows how British scientists lack the crucial competitive commercial edge and/or that the Americans are unscrupulous and underhand profit-hunters.You can hear very similar arguments made today about funding, commercialization and patenting, so maybe we can learn something useful about drug discovery from the history of penicillin?Hints from...
Source: Guardian Unlimited Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Blogposts guardian.co.uk History of science Source Type: news