Breaking All of the Rules

As a follow up to my blog about the development of sulfa drugs I offer the equally compelling story of the next wonder drug Penicillin.

While it is generally accepted that Alexander Fleming was the modern scientist who brought attention to the drug penicillin, it is noted in every history of the drug that it had been used since the beginning of time by ancient societies upwards of 3,000 years ago to treat wounds and other bacterial infections of the skin. Fleming described his accidental rediscovery of the drug in 1928 at St Mary's Hospital.

At that time nearly all workers in Great Britian were covered for medical care by the passage of the National Insurance Act of 1911. Whether this first socialized medicine scheme was the reason we will never know for sure but for one reason or another the discovery of penicillin was then shelved for nearly three decades.

Then it was taken off the shelf by the need to treat wounded soldiers in WWII whose bacterial wounds were not responding to the "Red" pill described in my last post. First, however, the private labs in the United States had to "break all the rules" to develop the wonder drug.

The USDA established a lab in Peoria, IL in 1941 for the speedy development of the newly rediscovered miracle drug but could not develop a method to produce enough of the highly unstable chemical to fill the estimated need for a million doses by D-Day in 1944.

The project was languishing in Peoria until the "Drug Cartel" got together and broke all of the rules. Merck and Company, Charles Pfizer and Company, E. R. Squibb and Sons, and Abbott Laboratories were the industry giants trying to help government scientists but they were prohibited from working independently or collaboratively outside of government supervision by the Sherman Anti-trust laws in effect at the time.

Then John Wyeth and Brother, labs of PA broke the rules and hired a tinkerer from the American Home Products Company in Chester, PA named Raymond Rettew. Using an abandoned gas station garage Rettew used mushroom technology to create enough penicillin to supply the lab in Peoria. Then E. B. Badger Company broke the rules and hired a woman chemical engineer [the very first one from MIT] named Margaret Hutchinson Rousseau.

Margaret Hutchinson Rousseau was awarded a degree from Rice University in 1932. She then earned an advanced degree in chemical engineering in 1937 from MIT in Cambridge, MA. Badger's gamble on an untried woman chemist and mother of one young son paid off. she had previously developed a method to make high octane jet fuel. Using the same technology she then developed a procedure of aerating the penicillin to stablize the mixture and seperate the drug from the mushroom base.

As a result the engineers at Wyeth were able to ship 1 billion doses of penicillin to the US Army by June of 1944 and thousands of lives were saved that month and millions more in the years that followed.

But penicillin, the drug that was put on the shelf in government run hospitals in the social medical environment of Great Britain from 1928 until 1944 became a reality when US Capitalists broke the rules to develop the second wonder drug in medical history.

What would have happened if there were no private developers of new drugs in the US 1941? We know what happened when there were none in Great Britain.