The Discovery and Development of Penicilin

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Penicillin has been considered a miracle drug by doctors ever since it was first used in 1942. It could cure nearly every disease that it was prescribed for and was the cause of a major turning point in World War 2. Yet, for the past forty years there have been bacteria strains discovered that can withstand the power of Penicillin. The mass production and misuse of penicillin has caused the miracle drug to become ineffective towards serious infections.
Penicillin is a form of anti-biotic. The first antibiotic was discovered by Paul Vuillemin, who studied the effects of Antibiosis or the process in which an organism takes another’s life in order to maintain its own life (Porter 455). Penicillin is one of the most well known and most used antibiotics on the market today. It refers to a mold that does not allow the bacteria surrounding it to reproduce, effectively destroying it (Hamblin 240). After its initial discovery, Penicillin was purified and manipulated into a form that could be used to cure bacterial infections (Aldridge, Parascandola,and Sturchio 4). Penicillin is one of the greatest medical discoveries during the twentieth century, but it wasn’t ready to use the day after it was discovered, in fact, it took years before clinical use and before it was successfully mass produced.
The first step towards mass production was gaining the support of the public. World War 2 allowed penicillin to gain popularity because of its impact on the allied forces. Because of the widespread use in the war and because of production rate, the price of penicillin dropped from 20$ per vial to one dollar per vial (Hamblin 240). This price drop allowed it to become more accessible to the public, and by the 1950’s penicillin was being used to trea...

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Skold, Ola. Antibiotics and Antibiotic Resistance. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons , 2010. Print.
Wainwright, Milton. Miracle cure: the story of penicillin and the golden age of antibiotics. Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1990. Print.
Watson, Stephanie. Superbugs: the rise of drug-resistant germs. New York, NY: Rosen Pub., 2010. Print.
White, William L.. "The Use Of Penicillin In Surgical Infections." the american journal of the medical sciences 208.2 (1944): 248-255. Print.
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