Rush on Penicillin

Penicillin, the wonder drug of 1943, last week made headlines up & down the nation. Newspapers reported a wave of frantic appeals for the drug by blood-poisoning sufferers who suddenly learned that 1) penicillin might save their lives, 2) there was not enough to go around.

The rush began last fortnight when a distraught father phoned the city editor of the New York Journal-American, begged him to help get some penicillin for his baby daughter Patricia, who was dying of a staphylococcus blood infection. The city editor made the most of a journalistic opportunity, persuaded an official of WPB, which controls the minuscule U.S. supply of penicillin, to release some for Patricia. Four hours later a Journal-American car, with a convoy of screaming police sirens, drove up to the hospital with ,the drug. Next morning Patricia was much better.

Requests and Rations. It was not the first U.S. use of penicillin for a civilian (among several hundred who have received it were some victims of the Boston Coconut Grove fire), but it was by far the most publicized. Within a few hours after the nation's press had picked up Patricia's story, requests for penicillin began to pour into WPB, the Army, the White House. Only a few applicants, with diseases for which penicillin has been proved effective,* got it (one who did died nonetheless).

Most moving plea was by comely, 19-year-old Marie Barker, of Chicago, who wrote Eleanor Roosevelt: "Won't you ask the Army to send me a little of its precious life-saving medicine so that I may have a fighting chance? I am engaged to marry a fine man now serving in the U.S. Army." But Marie got no penicillin: doctors held that it could not save her because her hemolytic staphylococcus infection had affected the heart.

The man who had the unenviable job of deciding who should and who should not get penicillin was Dr. Chester S. Keefer, of Boston's Evans Hospital. He is chairman of the National Research Council's committee on chemical therapy, to which WPB turned over the rationing of the drug. Because it is especially effective in treating battle-wound infections, most of the meager supply (amount: a military secret) goes to the armed forces.

Plants and Processes. Penicillin is scarce because the only way it is being made commercially is by the extremely slow growth of a mold similar to a cheese mold. But plans for expanded manufacturing facilities and experiments on new processes hold out hope for an increase in the supply. In recent months the leading producers have increased their output more than tenfold. Last week Commercial Sol vents Corp. and Winthrop Chemical Co. announced that they were building big new penicillin plants.

One hope for increased production is a new and speedier mold process developed by Stanford University's Bacteriologist Charles E. Clifton. Suggested by the method of making vinegar by dripping alcohol through wood shavings inoculated with bacteria, Clifton's laboratory experiments show that penicillin can be made by dribbling a mold-growing solution through shavings inoculated with the mold. In the present commercial process the mold grows in jars without mechanical help. Clifton's process would result in continuous production.

*No cureall, penicillin has so far been uSed to treat only a limited group of infections: staphylococcus aureus (causing bone infections, cellulitis, face carbuncles, certain types of pneumonia), hemolytic streptococcus, gonorrhea.

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