Happy Accidents: Serendipity in Major Medical Breakthroughs in the Twentieth Century by Morton A. Meyers Read Free Book Online Page B

powerful antibiotic. On Waksman's instruction, Doris Jones tested it against salmonella infections in chick embryos and confirmed its ability to cure. Furthermore, she found it had no toxicity in laboratory animals.
    At this point, Schatz took it upon himself to move to the next stage of research on the potential of the antibiotic now called Streptomyces griseus. It had been a fundamental aim of his research to seek an antibiotic that would cure tuberculosis. At the time, the only treatments for TB were prolonged bed rest and nutritious food. He had almost a religious zeal in this pursuit and could not be dissuaded by his colleagues’ insistence that the heavy wax capsule of the bacilli would resist drug action. Penicillin was useless against it, but Schatz held to the premise that if nutrients could enter the cell and waste products leave, so could antibiotics pass through the capsule. With great purpose, he tested streptomycin against tuberculosis and patiently waited several weeks for the slow-growing colonies to appear on the culture medium. The results were clear. Where streptomycin was added, not a single colony appeared, whereas in the controls dense growths were apparent. Schatz had shown that the new antibiotic was dramatically effective in inhibiting the growth of tuberculosis germs.
    A short report published by Schatz, Bugie, and Waksman in January 1944 emphasized the antibiotic activity of streptomycin against gram-positive and gram-negative bacteria, but curiously included only marginal notation regarding its effectiveness in tuberculosis. Nevertheless, researchers at the Mayo Clinic, long interested in the treatment of the disease, committed to undertaking animal experiments and then human trials. Schatz spent eighteen-hour days working in his small basement laboratory to concentrate the antibiotic for the Mayo Clinic trials, sleeping with two old, torn blankets on the floor to monitor the continuous running of laboratory apparatus.
    Later in the year, a second paper by Schatz and Waksman based on test tube work announced the effectiveness of streptomycin against tuberculosis. 8 By April, Schatz was able to provide a meager supply of impure streptomycin to be used at the Mayo Clinic.
    Favorable results in guinea pigs led eight pharmaceutical companies to provide an estimated $1 million worth of streptomycin for the largest clinical study of a drug ever undertaken, involving several thousand tuberculosis patients. This constituted the first privately financed, nationally coordinated clinical drug evaluation in history. Medicine had taken a giant step in embracing the value of controlled experiments repeated thousands of times in the evaluation of a new drug. Once again, the drug worked wonders. Side effects, including impairment of the sense of balance and deafness, proved to be transitory and could be minimized by controlling the dosage. The drug's use was also limited by its tendency to produce resistant strains of the tubercle bacillus. In 1947 streptomycin was released to the public.
The Scourge of TB
Tuberculosis is one of the oldest infectious diseases, having afflicted humans since Neolithic times. In the previous century and a half, it claimed an estimated billion lives worldwide. The “white plague of Europe” that raged in the seventeenth century was due to growing urban populations.
Mycobacterium tuberculosis was identified by Robert Koch in1882. Because it has the ability to enclose itself in nodules in the body, the tubercle bacillus can remain dormant for years, then strike any part of the body with deadly results, although it most commonly affects the lungs. For centuries, “consumption,” as it was called, was believed to physically stimulate intellectual and artistic genius. (Some of the greats who were so afflicted include Molière, Voltaire, Spinoza, Schiller, Goethe, Kafka, Gorki, Chekhov, Paganini, Chopin, Dr. Johnson, Scott, Keats, the Brontë sisters, D. H. Lawrence, Thoreau, Emerson,