889 Early descriptions of antibiosis

The " discovery " of penicillin by Fleming in 1928 and its dramatic production, urged on by the necessities of war, heralded a new era of therapeutics. It has changed the pattern of disease the prognosis of infections, the expectation of life, indeed, it has changed the whole human ecology. Before the discovery of penicillin, there were many early descriptions of the characteristics and properties of the penicillia and other moulds. Mycologically penicillium had been so described for 170 years, but in history and prehistory the characteristic green mould had been long associated with bad air, death, and putrefaction. The name Penicillium was first given to a genus of fungi by Link in his Observationes in 1809. The genus was described briefly and three species enumerated Penicillium glaucum, Penicillium candidum and Penicillium expansum. It is not possible from nineteenth-century descriptions to identify the moulds P. glaucum or P. candidum except to recognise the familiar " penicillus " or brush characteristic of the penicillia. It is regrettable that Link and sub¬ sequent workers abandoned the use of the term P. expansum to differentiate some of the peni¬ cillia and called all the green penicillia moulds Penicillium glaucum! Thus the use of this nomen¬ clature in early scientific papers gives no indication ofthe true identity ofthe Penicillium described. The antibacterial activity of some green moulds belonging to the genus Penicillium had been known to investigators at least since the nineteenth century and this is also true of various spore-forming and non-spore-forming organisms. There were early and albeit crude attempts to use therapeutically the antibiotic effects of some micro-organisms, for many had perceived the possibility of using this natural function of conflicting microbes. Pasteur and Joubert (1877) inoculated bacteria into animals with anthrax; Cantani (1885) introduced Bacterium termo into the lungs of tuberculous patients whilst Gasperini reported the antagonistic effects of some of the actinomycetes. " Pyocyanase " an antibacterial agent was extracted from cultures of Pseudomonas by Emmerich and Law (1899) and a "streptothrix" with bacteriolytic action was prepared by the sterile filtration of an actinomycete by Gratia and Dath in 1924 and later by Welsh. Nineteenth-century research in England The bacteriolytic properties of Penicillium were noted by Sturli (1908) and the lytic properties by Gratia in 1925 but the first scientific observations of the antagonistic actions of various micro-organisms were made long before, in England, in the preceding century by William Roberts of Manchester (1874) and John Tyndall of London (1876). Roberts described his experiments and observed that bacteria would not grow easily in prepared media covered with Penicillium glaucum. Two years later Tyndall gave a detailed account of the antagonism between moulds and bacteria and the antibacterial properties of the penicillia moulds.