Abstract

Abstract

Presenter: Bruce Arroll 

Bruce is a Professor of General Practice and Primary Health Care at the University of 
Auckland where he trained in Medicine in the 1970s. He did his family medicine training at McMaster University in Canada and returned to NZ in 1987 to do a PhD in Epidemiology and to train in Public Health Medicine. He is a fellow of the College of GPs and works at the University half time and does two days at the Auckland City Mission’s Calder Clinic. Before that he was in Manurewa for 32 years. He enjoys medical/health history and likes adding historical contexts to his student lectures. 

Penicillin: Fleming to Florey to D-day  

You most likely think that Alexander Fleming (a Scotsman) discovered penicillin at St Mary's Hospital in London in 1928. Then the rest was a simple translation into the medicines we still use widely today. There is much more to it than that, and in this talk, we will go from the discovery by Fleming to the search for an antibiotic at Oxford University starting in 1938. The team at the University of Oxford, led by Howard Florey (an Australian) and Ernst Boris Chain (a German), worked on isolating, purifying, and developing penicillin into a usable drug. Their efforts, along with contributions from Norman Heatley (English), Edward Abraham (English), and others, led to the mass production of penicillin, making it the first widely available antibiotic. Florey and Heatley realised that the war-torn UK did not have the resources to mass-produce penicillin, so they went to the USA to encourage mass production. Their initial reception was underwhelming as it was thought that penicillin might be too difficult to mass produce. The turning point came when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbour and the USA joined the Allied effort in WW II, much to the relief of the UK government. The United States played a crucial role in scaling production, with pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer, Merck, and Squibb refining methods to produce penicillin in large quantities. There were more than 20 pharmaceutical companies involved in the manufacture. This breakthrough revolutionised medicine, saving countless lives and marking the beginning of the antibiotic era.

Abstract