Monstrous penicillium makes Marvellous penicillin

HP Lovecraft died before injections of penicillin were freely on offer but I highly doubt he would have accepted any if they had been available.

His particular set of monsters and horrors were slippery slimy moldy thingies and the thought to him of someone voluntarily polluting their sacred human temple with the pee and poop of such terrors was literally beyond the ken.

Popular culture hasn't really moved on from Lovecraft's deepest fears -- it still sees giant gooey slimy dissolving fluid lifeforms as the most terrifying of the 'monstrous made visible'.

But once outside the movieplex, we are quite willing to have white crystal-pure 'beta lactam' antibiotics from huge factories put into our 21st century human temples - despite half-knowing that the pure white powder actually originates as the time-honored waste excretions of Lovecraft's still terrifying green slime.

Penicillin (today's all-white version anyway) seems safely far far away from the moldy smelling blue-green slime that we , doctors and patients  alike, still fear is rotting out our teenager's basement apartment and making our worksite "toxic" and "sick".

Because consistency is truly 'the hobgoblin of little minds' and we are broad minded adults here , are we not ?

Rumours of death of wartime penicillins : "Greatly Exaggerated"

Seventy five years on , the wartime penicillins are just dusty relics , found only in some museum of medical curios, right ?

(You been talking to your GP again ?)

It is simply amazing how many family doctors dismiss wartime penicillins and say 'we physicians are all into the latest beta lactams today' .

Time for some FACTS, Doc :

Viagra and Lipitor are some of the best known and best selling drugs of all time.

So how much of them are produced annually ?

Two Hundred and fifty metric tons each - very impressive numbers in the world of drug production.

So how much of the old wartime penicillins ( Penicillins G , V and N) are still produced annually ?

How about fifty thousand tonnes (!!!!)

So much so, and at such cheap prices ,that some statistic indices rate them as commodity chemicals like caustic soda and ethyl alcohol - the cheap bulk raw materials intended for further chemical or biological processing.

Because that is exactly what the wartime penicillin are produced in such huge amounts for - to be worked up into the varied anti-bacterial drugs we call the modern beta lactams.

The old geezers are still the foundation beneath the largest component of the anti-bacterial armoury (and one of the largest components of overall acute care medications).

Seventy five years on , the best of chemistry and microbiology has still not bettered how cheaply and efficiently the tiny penicillium chrysogenum eat cheap farm wastes and turn them into valued lifesavers.

Alexander Fleming was dead wrong, Howard Florey was dead wrong, almost every WWII era doctor, scientist and science journalist was dead wrong.

The wartime chemists did not quickly and decisively eclipse these tiny un-super heroes of the era of antibiotics .

And they still haven't done so, even today...

Chemistry PhD = Hubris ?

As penicillium mold spores drift about through the air, the fortunate ones land on a suitably moist food supply.

The spores almost need the moisture more than the food , as they can feed on almost any organic matter.

But when they get stressed, usually when the food supply runs low , they may respond by producing the antibiotics we rather loosely call by the single word 'penicillin' , to keep at bay bacterial competitors for that same food.

Note I said antibiotics in the plural, because, depending on the particular food source at hand, each penicillin produced might be in fact ever so slightly different.

Technically, the key part of the penicillin molecule - the famous strained beta lactam ring - must always be there , for it to work as a antibiotic .

But the extra bit on the side of that key component - the side chain - can vary widely and will tend to produce various kinds and strengths of antibiotics.

Many of them offer different - useful - qualities - from the original penicillin (type G).

Now, in Nature , all these marvellous variants are mere happy accidents induced by the chance of varying wind currents and drifting spores.

In the Lab, biologists and chemists feed the penicillium spores all sorts of extra food treats , (fancied up ,the technical word for these humble food supplements is precursors) hoping to see a useful variant emerge.

When the new improved variants do emerge , the chemists tend to glorify this 'brute force' approach to the discovery of new chemicals by daring to call the results "semi-synthetic" penicillin.

But this just hubris and hooey.

It is merely a way for human chemists - who tried and failed to make penicillin from scratch* like the tiny mold spores so readilyand so easily did - to regain some lost luster for their profession.

(*To chemists , this is their holy grail of  "total synthesis".)

Because it is really no different than the ancient practise of farmers trying out plants on differing soil mixtures and cultivation techniques and running with the methods that gave the best yields.

The chemists, rather like the British , lost really big in WWII.

Partly to physics (the A-Bomb) and partly to biology (natural penicillin triumphing over the chemists' failure to make synthetic penicillin) .

And like the British, they've been trying to re-write the history of WWII ever since ....