一戰戰死的一千萬士兵中，差不多一半死於本來隻是輕傷的傷口感染。在抗生素發現之前，水泡引起的細菌感染就可以要一個人的命。這就是為什麽當時工業國家的人均壽命也隻有47歲。
二戰中，美國軍方僅次於原子彈的耗資第二大的研發項目是盤尼西林。他們勉強在諾曼底登陸之前批量生產出來了。而在中國戰區，大部分傷員隻能用酒精和紅藥水，就連磺胺藥都稀缺，更不用說盤尼西林了。盤尼西林在香港黑市的價格，大約是一條“小黃魚”金條一盒。
1928年蘇格蘭科學家 Alexander Fleming發現了盤尼西林的殺菌作用，但無法提取其有效成分，後來放棄了。1939年二戰在歐洲爆發，澳大利亞醫生Howard Florey得到了funding from the Rockefeller Foundation in New York to study Fleming’s discovery further at the University of Oxford.
原諒我，為了省時間就不翻譯了，直接摘錄英文吧：
Through trial and error, the team had discovered that penicillin was much more effective and safer in fighting bacteria in animals than sulfa drugs, which were the treatment for infections at the time. Discovered by German scientists in the 1930s, sulfa drugs had severe side effects, and researchers were motivated to find an alternative.
As they tried to cultivate penicillin, they began a few human tests. In summer 1940, Albert Alexander, a police officer, scratched his face. The scratch became infected by streptococci and staphylococci and spread to his eyes and scalp. A few weeks later, he was admitted to an Oxford University hospital and given doses of a sulfa drug for a week. Not only did the drug not cure him but it gave him a terrible rash.
Alexander was in great pain for months as he lay in the hospital with no cure available. His face and arms were oozing pus everywhere, and his left eye became so infected that it had to be removed. The bacteria soon spread to his lungs and shoulders. Desperate, doctors gave him 200 milligrams of penicillin, the largest individual dose ever given at the time, and then three doses of 100 mg every three hours. Within 24 hours, Alexander’s fever went back to normal and his appetite returned. But his treatment had used up the nation’s entire supply of penicillin. After 10 days of stability, his condition deteriorated without any more of the drug. A second course would have helped him to fully heal, but no more to give him. On March 15, he died,
The Oxford team continued to hunt for methods to produce more penicillin, knowing penicillin’s urgent value in treating wounded soldiers and civilians。
As Europe sank deeper into war, labs around the world got word of the Oxford lab’s penicillin research and began requesting samples. Florey and his team were careful not to send any to German scientists, who could have easily developed them to support the Nazi war effort.
British pharmaceutical companies were interested in mass-producing penicillin, but they were overburdened by wartime demand for other drugs. Florey and Heatley began looking overseas for help, turning once again to the Rockefeller Foundation in New York. Florey realized that the United States, which had not entered the war yet, had many more pharmaceutical firms than Britain with much more capacity to produce penicillin on a large scale.
Florey visited U.S. drug companies in the hope of persuading one or more of them to brew the culture fluid and extract the mold to yield enough for his experiments. Then war struck the United States: The Japanese attacked U.S. Navy ships anchored in Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941. The declaration of war on the United States by Germany and Italy changed not only the course of the war but also the course of the development of penicillin. With millions of American lives now at stake, penicillin was no longer just a scientific fascination — it was a medical necessity.
Ten days after the Pearl Harbor attack, pharmaceutical companies began escalating penicillin production for the war effort, some experimenting with a process called deep-tank fermentation to extract the drug from the mold.
As war escalated throughout 1942, researcher Andrew Moyer led the USDA Peoria lab in finding the most potent penicillin mold that would hold up during fermentation extraction. Each day, he sent assistant Mary Hunt to local markets for decaying fruit or anything with fungal growth to find more-productive strains of the penicillin mold. Earning the nickname “Moldy Mary,” she once found a cantaloupe “with a mold so powerful that in time it became the ancestor of most of the penicillin produced in the world.”
Throughout 1943, penicillin production became the War Department’s No. 2 priority after the Manhattan Project’s drive to build a nuclear bomb.
In July 1943, the War Production Board made plans for widespread distribution of penicillin stocks to Allied troops fighting in Europe. Then scientists worked round-the-clock to prepare for an ultimate goal: having enough to support the D-Day invasion.
On June 6, 1944, 73,000 U.S. troops landed on the beaches of Normandy, boosted by millions of doses of the miracle drug. Almost three years to the day that Florey arrived in New York, American production of penicillin had risen from 0 to 100 billion units per month using deep-tank fermentation — enough to treat every Allied casualty.
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