90th Anniversary Issue: 1930s
Germ warfare, tracking Pluto's rise and fall and other highlights, 1930–39
By Science News
Germ warfare
Alexander Fleming’s Nobel Prize–winning discovery of a germ-fighting constituent from mold — penicillin (5/17/30, p. 314) — launched a renaissance in the control of infectious disease. The drug became so pivotal in fighting battlefield infections that civilian supplies had all but dried up by 1943. That prompted one researcher to share a detailed recipe, reported in Science News Letter, so that any doctor could “if he wishes make in his own home kitchen a supply of crude penicillin for treatment of … infections in or near the surface of the skin” (11/27/43, p. 350). A second major family of antibiotics — the sulfa drugs — also began around the same time to knock out formerly lethal or intractable infections, from tuberculosis to meningitis and scarlet fever. Before the 1930s were done, Gerhard Domagk, who discovered the first sulfonamide antibiotic, would be recognized with a Nobel, beating Fleming by six years. — Janet Raloff