Chicago Tribune from Chicago, Illinois • 208

ff sJ )) As more and more Americans fall victim to the deadly disease, the desperate question grows louder, 'Where are the drugs to fight LJ Article by Dennis L. Breo 1942 Anne Miller lay hours from death from blood poisoning in Connecticut's Yale-New Haven Medical Center. She had suffered complications from a miscarriage, and her doctors had nowhere to turn. "We tried every known treatment, including the new sulfa drugs," one of her physicians, Dr. 4 Orvan Hess, later recalled, "but nothing could bring the fever down.

She was within days of dying, and we decided to cast around for drastic new Hess was a pioneering Yale obstetrician, tnd he and his colleagues decided to gamble on a last-ditch measure a new experimental drug. The drug had been tried on only one person in England, with inconclusive results. As Anne Miller lay in her hospital bed, the medical directors of the Allied armed forces and government officials in Washington, London and Moscow were eagerly awaiting results from the first tests of the new drug. Hundreds of scientists in a score of government and university laboratories, as well as their counterparts in three American drug companies Merck, Pfizer and Squibb were involved in trying to mass-produce the drug. Through a suspenseful chain of events, Miller's doctors persuaded U.S.

government officials to release 5.5 grams of the experimental drug for their dying patient, and a messenger from Merck delivered the precious drug in a little brown bag, about a teaspoon of crystalline penicillin, about half the supply then available in the country. The drug was passed through a Seftz filter for purification and dissolved in a saline solution for intravenous injection. Penicillin was about to be tried in a human being. Miller herself was not too optimistic; she later remembered that the drug "had the odor of mustard." For 14 years the drug had been in development, the product of a combination of chance and chemistry. In 1928 the British physician Alexander Fleming left an agar plate containing a culture of bacteria open to the air in the research lab of his London hospital.

The spore of a rare airborne fungus happened to land on the culture and sprouted a mold that devoured the bacteria. Fleming knew that his in vitw (laboratory) observation was important, but he could not find a chemist to extract and purify the active ingredients of PemaUhim notation. About 10 years later British physicians Howard Florey and Ernest Chain devised a complicated mechanism to produce enough of the drug to prove that it destroyed disease-causing bacteria in animals (in vivo). That done, they then turned their attention to its use on humans. Nazi bombing raids, however, had by then relocated the historic quest from Oxford, England, to America.

After injecting the drug into Anne Miller, the doctors waited for a reaction. There was none. Four hours later, they gave her a larger dose. Still no reaction. They then discontinued all other medication; penicillin alone was ad-continued on page 12 Dennis Breo is the special-assignments editor of American Medical News and a SUNDAY contributing editor.

TOJB55 2n SEPTEMBER 25, 1988 11.