Penicillin Focuses on the Miraculous Discovery of Term Paper

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Penicillin focuses on the miraculous discovery of Alexander Fleming in the world of medicine called the Penicillin. This paper illustrates the process of discovery of this drug and outlines the various advantages it has caused not only to people but the society as well. This paper also emphasizes on the side effects of antibiotics but also proves how this may prove to be beneficial for many researchers, doctors and scientists.

Penicillin

One of the most brilliant knowledge advances of this century - as great as the computer, as great as the abolition of natural racial inferiority and growing awareness of spaceship earth, has been the conquest of infectious diseases. Drugs are thousands of years old. Neolithic, perhaps even paleolithic shamans and medicine men and women knew the curative powers of many plants. The ability of alcohol, in wine, beer and stronger liquors, to make life seem better than it really is has been used for many years to produce the same results. Nevertheless, almost all drugs and medicine used today have been discovered not just in this century but in the last forty years, since the end of the 1939-1945 war. In several ways the most important invention of the last hundred years is the drug whose accidental discovery inaugurated the antibiotic era: penicillin.

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Alexander Fleming discovered this miraculous medicine. After taking his medical degree in 1906 he began to conduct research on antibacterial substances that might be nontoxic to human tissues. By that time, it was explicitly known that bacteria caused many infections and could be killed. But the poisons, which were used to kill them such as carbolic acid, proved to be too toxic and life threatening for patients. In 1928, while working with cultures of Staphylococcus aureus, the pus producing bacterium, Fleming noticed a circle free of bacteria around a mold growth that had contaminated one of his slides. This type of mold grows on old bread and there could have been a possibility that a crumb from that bread might have fallen, unnoticed onto his culture. Excited, Fleming began to isolate the substance and in doing so discovered that the mold was capable of killing the bacteria even after being diluted hundred times. He named the drug penicillin. "The wide use of penicillin did not become possible until the 1940s when Howard Florey and Ernst Chain developed a powdery form of the medicine" (Mary Bellis, The History Of Penicillin).….....

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"Penicillin Focuses On The Miraculous Discovery Of" (2003, November 22) Retrieved June 6, 2026, from
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"Penicillin Focuses On The Miraculous Discovery Of", 22 November 2003, Accessed.6 June. 2026,
https://www.aceyourpaper.com/essays/penicillin-focuses-miraculous-discovery-159401