Posts Tagged ‘penicillin’
“What’s in a name?”
Antidepressant use is on the rise in the U.S.– and with it, the proliferation of new mood-management drug names. At the same time, the Tech Right’s fascination with The Lord of the Rings, has occasioned a flood of company and product names drawn from that fantasy series. It can be very confusing, as a new game from the folks at Vercel demonstrates. Can you tell if a name is an antidressant drug or a Tolkien character?
* Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet (Act II, Scene II)
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As we navigate nomenclature, we might recall that it was on this date in 1941 that first injection of penicillin into a patient was administered by physician Charles Fletcher at Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford, England.
In 1928, Alexander Fleming had discovered the anitbacterial properties of the Penicillium mold. But he had little luck convincing his medical colleagues of its value: penicillin was so difficult to isolate that its development as a drug seemed impossible. After Fletcher’s experiment and others– all of which showed promise, but “failed” when the doctors ran out of penicillin– Fleming used the hospital’s entire supply of penicillin to cure a patient of an infection of the nervous system (streptococcal meningitis) which would otherwise have been fatal. Having established medical efficacy, the doctors were able to convince labs in the U.K and the U.S. to pursue large-scale fermentation of the mold and refinments in its medical form. By June 1942, just enough US penicillin was available to treat ten patients. But with the U.S. entry into World War II, the War Production Board undertook to make penicillin available to fighting forces across the conflict. By June, 1945, over 646 billion units per year were being produced.
“Gain not base gains; base gains are the same as losses”*…
When inventor Frederick Banting discovered insulin in 1921, he refused to put his name on the patent. He felt it was unethical for a doctor to profit from a discovery that would save lives. Banting’s co-inventors, James Collip and Charles Best, sold the insulin patent to the University of Toronto for a mere $1. They wanted everyone who needed their medication to be able to afford it. [see here]
Today, Banting and his colleagues would be spinning in their graves: Their drug, which many of the 30 million Americans with diabetes rely on, has become the poster child for pharmaceutical price gouging.
The cost of the four most popular types of insulin has tripled over the past decade, and the out-of-pocket prescription costs patients now face have doubled. By 2016, the average price per month rose to $450 — and costs continue to rise, so much so that as many as one in four people with diabetes are now skimping on or skipping lifesaving doses…
Why Americans ration a drug discovered– and given free to the world– in the 1920s: “The absurdly high cost of insulin, explained.”
* Hesiod (See also Proverbs 28:20: “he that maketh haste to be rich shall not be innocent”)
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As we ponder pleonexia, we might send healing birthday greetings to Edward Lawrie Tatum; he was born on this date in 1909. A geneticist, he shared half of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1958 with George Beadle for showing that genes control individual steps in metabolism. During World War II, his work was of use in maximizing penicillin production, and it has also made possible the introduction of new methods for assaying vitamins and amino acids in foods and tissues. Tatum and Joshua Lederberg (the winner of the other half of the 1958 Nobel award), discovered genetic recombination in bacteria.
His discoveries were made freely available to the scientific community.
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