Streptomycin

Streptomycin was one of the major medical discoveries of this century. Tuberculosis could now be cured. No longer had the patient to stay for months in a sanatorium, where cure was by no means certain, even in early cases. Many drugs were tried: creosote was a favourite in early days, apparently because it was excreted by the lungs and had an antiseptic sort of smell. Gold salts were used for quite a long time with no good results. Certain chemical substances allied to sulphanilamides seemed hopeful. Perhaps the most bizarre was insufflation of the bowel with a mixture of carbon dioxide and sulphurated hydrogen. Penicillin proved to be useless. The tubercle bacillus enclosed in a kind of waxy envelope was immune to all these. It could affect not only the lungs but almost any organ in the human body, the brain, the kidneys, the lymph glands, the bones, the joints, even the skin. No wonder Sir William Gull commented on the difficulty in diagnosis. The discovery of streptomycin in no way resembled that of penicillin, where a spore of a particular variety of penicillium was blown in through an open window in Fleming's laboratory and landed on a culture plate, to be noticed almost by accident some time later. Streptomycin was discovered after the most intense labour of a number of scientists, especially Selman A Waksman. It had been known for a long time that there were certain organisms in the soil, called either fungi or bacteria-depending on whether they were being described by a mycologist or a bacteriologist-which had the property of inhibiting the growth of, or killing, other bacteria. One particular group of these organisms called actinomyces, which seemed to be most efficient at surviving under adverse conditions, and in killing off its neighbours, was first described in 1890 by Gasparini. He named the sample he was studying streptothrix. Over the years other investigators wrote about the properties of this fungus, but the foundation of our modern knowledge was laid by Waksman. He was interested in the antibiotic properties which some of these fungi possessed. There were some organisms that penicillin did not affect at all, notably the tubercle bacillus, and there was a hope that this new antibiotic might deal with it. The first experiments began in the microbiology laboratory of the New Jersey Agricultural Experimental Station in 1939. A strain of actinomyces was isolated, the product …