Here Is Where: Discovering America's Great Forgotten History (38 page)

Dr. Alexander Fleming’s discovery of penicillin at St. Mary’s Hospital in London is probably the most oft-cited “accidental” medical discovery in history, and ever since I heard about how Horace Wells practically stumbled over his nitrous-oxide idea at Union Hall, I’ve been on the lookout for similar fortuitous scientific advances here in the States. While studying up on Goldberger in a tattered secondhand medical textbook, I inadvertently flipped past the pellagra section and landed midway into the chapter on penicillin. One word floated off the page:
Peoria
.

I read more carefully and learned that, although Fleming was indeed responsible for the initial find, it was a team of American scientists in Illinois who transformed penicillin into a wonder drug that has since saved millions of lives. And they, too, had good fortune on their side.

SERENDIPITY HAS LONG
been one of medicine’s most steadfast collaborators. I don’t say this to demean in any way the scientists who’ve made groundbreaking discoveries by mistake; their genius was recognizing what others might have ignored or tossed into the garbage. “In the fields of observation,” the French chemist and microbiologist Louis Pasteur remarked, “chance favors only the prepared mind.”

Pasteur spoke from experience. While studying a particular strain of cholera in 1879, he and his assistant Charles Chamberland forgot to infect a brood of lab chickens with the disease before they headed out on vacation (Pasteur and Chamberland, not the chickens). Upon returning to Paris weeks later, Pasteur injected the birds with the now
weakened culture and found that instead of dying, they became immunized. From this research Pasteur invented several lifesaving vaccines.

As evidence that scientists should probably take more holidays, when Alexander Fleming got back from his summer break in 1928, the notoriously untidy doctor noticed mold growing in a Petri dish containing
Staphylococcus aureus
that was inhibiting the bacteria’s growth. Fleming wondered if the furry blue-green lump, later identified as
Penicillium notatum
, could possibly be a new germicide, and after further testing, it indeed turned out to be an extremely effective antibiotic.

Fleming announced his find in February 1929 at the prestigious Medical Research Club, but none of his colleagues showed much interest. His June 1929 article on penicillin, published in the
British Journal of Experimental Pathology
, met with similar apathy. Painfully shy, Fleming didn’t push the topic and eventually immersed himself in other projects.

Almost a decade later, England was bracing for war and British scientists urgently sought out new treatments for battlefield infections, which they knew from past conflicts often killed more troops than bombs and bullets combined. Thirty-three-year-old Dr. Ernst Chain, a Jewish refugee from Hitler’s Germany who resembled a young Albert Einstein, stumbled across Fleming’s 1929 article by “sheer luck,” he later said, and showed it to Dr. Howard Florey, his boss at Oxford University’s Sir William Dunn School of Pathology. Florey agreed that it warranted more study, and the two men, along with Dr. Norman Heatley and Dr. Margaret Jennings, secured a Rockefeller Foundation grant to research penicillin’s medical applications. Funding appeals to their own government’s Medical Research Council, British pharmaceutical companies, and Oxford University were all rejected.

Time was running short. In July 1940 the Luftwaffe launched a ferocious six-month bombing campaign over England that ultimately killed more than twenty thousand civilians. Like many parents who
had the means, Florey sent his children overseas, and they ended up staying in Connecticut with his friend Dr. John Fulton. Aside from possibly losing their own lives, Florey and his team feared that a direct strike on their lab would wipe out irreplaceable research; a single batch of Fleming’s original
Penicillium notatum
was all they had to work with. In case of a full-on German invasion, they planned to rub the penicillin spores, which were extremely resilient, into their coat pockets and flee to a neutral country.

On February 12, 1941, police constable Albert Alexander became the first person treated with penicillin. Alexander had scratched his face on a rose thorn, causing an infection to flare across his cheeks and into his eyeballs, which started to swell up hideously. The right eye had to be lanced right away before bursting, and the left one was extracted entirely. Soon Alexander’s entire body was under attack. “He was oozing pus everywhere,” Heatley recorded in his diary. Then, less than twenty-four hours after Alexander received penicillin, his condition improved noticeably, and by February 22 he had rebounded almost completely.

Almost. Just as he was on the verge of a full recovery, doctors exhausted their penicillin stock. Despite his dramatic turnaround, Alexander’s now defenseless body was unable to repel the last lingering microbes, and they multiplied with a vengeance. Within days he was dead.

Florey and Heatley had frantically tried to grow penicillin in anything they could get their hands on—Petri dishes, bedpans, pie tins, cafeteria trays—but purifying the low-yield mold was maddeningly slow. If one patient could so rapidly drain their supplies, they realized, there was no hope of providing mass quantities for injured troops and civilians in the years to come.

Still unable to persuade the British government or private companies to underwrite their efforts, Florey decided he would have to approach a partner outside of war-torn Europe, a partner with the resources, manpower, and scientific wherewithal to produce this new wonder drug on a massive scale. He knew just whom to call.

·  ·  ·

“Good morning, USDA, how may I help you?” a lovely Scottish voice asked when I first contacted the Department of Agriculture’s National Center for Agricultural Utilization Research (NCAUR) in Peoria. I told the receptionist, Jackie Shepherd, what I was doing and briefly recapped my understanding of NCAUR’s role in manufacturing penicillin after English doctors had discovered it. Jackie verified that, yes, I had the right place, and connected me to their communications officer, Katherine O’Hara, to schedule a visit. But before patching me through, Jackie playfully admonished me. “I don’t believe that Fleming was English,” she said, her native lilt sounding stronger than before. “He was a Scotsman.”

When I arrive weeks later at 1815 North University Street I’m pleased to find Jackie manning the front desk, and she’s as gracious in person as on the phone. Jackie buzzes Katherine O’Hara, and while I’m waiting, I peruse the lobby display cases about NCAUR and its three sister labs in Louisiana, California, and Pennsylvania. They were all built during the Depression to devise new ways of putting surplus crops to good use, and their accomplishments are both impressive and eclectic. They’ve created frozen concentrated orange juice, lactose-free milk, dehydrated potato flakes, biodegradable plastics, and a silicone emulsion that preserves antique books. Peoria, specifically, came up with the idea of using infrared lamps to make french fries crispy, designed an ingenious method of cleaning Navy warplanes by air blasting them with ground corncobs, and produced the blood plasma substitute dextran.

Katherine, a warm and welcoming host, takes me up to her office, where she hands me a packet of penicillin-related materials from NCAUR’s archives.

“Here’s what started it all,” she says, pulling out the historic July 9, 1941, telegram from Department of Agriculture administrator Dr.

Percy Wells to NCAUR director Dr. Orville E. May:

Heatley and Florey’s journey to the United States was exhausting and dangerous, requiring cloak-and-dagger measures to get them from London to Lisbon, where they scurried onto a Pan Am Clipper with blacked-out windows. From Portugal they flew directly to New York City. America wasn’t yet at war, but with the Luftwaffe patrolling the skies over Europe and German warships prowling the Atlantic, no mode of transportation to the States was safe. (Before leaving, Heatley and Florey went out for a much-needed night of entertainment and decided to catch the new Alfred Hitchcock thriller
Foreign Correspondent
. They were unaware that in the movie’s climactic scene, a plane identical to theirs is shot by a German destroyer and plunges into the ocean. “The sinking of the ‘Clipper’ in the film struck [Florey] & me as rather a bad thing to see,” Heatley noted dryly in his diary.) Throughout the entire trip, Florey held on tightly to a briefcase packed with notebooks and carefully wrapped vials of freeze-dried penicillin.

They landed at LaGuardia Field on July 2 wearing thick wool suits more appropriate for England’s cooler climate than Manhattan’s sweltering heat. But summer humidity or not, neither man let go of his jacket; smeared into the coat pockets were the “backup” spores they would use in the event that Florey’s briefcase was heisted.

From the East Coast, the doctors made their way to Peoria, and on July 14 they met with Dr. Robert Coghill, director of NCAUR’s fermentation division, and Dr. Andrew Moyer, an expert on the nutrition of molds.

“Clete here is going to take you to Moyer and Coghill’s old labs,” Katherine says as she introduces me to Dr. Cletus Kurtzman, one of Moyer’s successors. Clete’s been working at NCAUR for forty-two
years and oversees a collection of 100,000 different microbes. After we talk for several minutes I can sense that his passion is undiminished, and I ask him what first got him interested in science.

“I’ve been fascinated since I was a child. I’d go down to the pharmacy and buy powdered sulfur, potassium nitrate, and sulfuric acid, then come home and do experiments. Looking back on it, I’m surprised they’d sell those things to a boy, but it sure was fun.” He adds wistfully, “Those were the good old days.”

“And you never got hurt or anything?” I ask, thinking of how a young Robert Goddard nearly blew himself to pieces playing with similar chemicals.

“Let’s just say I’m very lucky to have all ten digits and a face.”

Clete and I start walking over to the building’s center section, and along the way he tells me, “I’m afraid the laboratories won’t look like they did originally.”

“No worries,” I say. “I just want to see where it all happened.”

Within forty-eight hours of Heatley and Florey’s arrival at NCAUR, Moyer and his team were hard at work cultivating the samples smuggled over from Oxford. After an initial scare, when the spores that had blossomed so quickly in England didn’t take to NCAUR’s balmy, 80-degree-plus temperatures (the new air-conditioning system wasn’t operational until that September), the Peoria scientists were finally able to grow the first tiny batch of mold by July’s end.

To mass-produce penicillin, which was the whole reason the Oxford doctors had come to Illinois, Moyer first suggested utilizing corn-steep liquor in the fermentation process. The idea was as much practical as it was scientific; the thick, syrupy liquid was rich in nitrogen, and it could be acquired easily because nobody wanted the stuff. A by-product of cornstarch, it was often just dumped into the Illinois River.

Adding corn-steep liquor alone, they discovered, upped the yield a stunning 1,000 percent.

Florey left Peoria to embark on a hat-in-hand tour of America’s pharmaceutical giants, begging them to mobilize their resources behind
penicillin. Drug companies were familiar with its potential but also its production-related drawbacks and, like their British counterparts, doubted they could make a profit. Cultivation tanks the size of swimming pools, some scientists estimated, would be needed in order to skim off enough mold from the culture fluid’s surface, and that investment alone was calculated to be prohibitively expensive.

The Peoria crew was working to tackle this very problem, and they believed that “submerged growth” was the solution. If penicillin were brewed up in large drums—not just on the surface but throughout the mixture—production could be boosted exponentially. Moyer recommended adding lactose to the corn-steep liquor and aerating the broth with a constant supply of sterile oxygen in ten-thousand-gallon vats.

This, too, increased yields substantially.

Moyer realized, however, that to truly maximize results they needed a more resilient mold. Leading the hunt for this new, tougher strain was another NCAUR mycologist, the unfortunately named Kenneth Raper, who instructed members of the U.S. Army Transport Command to bring him mold extracts and soil samples from wherever they traveled around the world.

Any reluctance the pharmaceutical industry had initially shown in the summer of 1941 vanished on December 7. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Lederle Laboratories, Merck, E. R. Squibb, and Charles Pfizer (more companies came aboard later) all agreed to join forces to mass-produce penicillin, and they received special dispensation from the government to work together without violating antitrust laws.

Having been on the sidelines for so long, the drug corporations struggled initially. By the early spring of 1942, they had collectively whipped up a mere 5.5 grams—barely more than a teaspoon’s worth—of pure penicillin, which at best could treat only a single individual.

The opportunity to do just that came in mid-March at Connecticut’s New Haven Hospital, where thirty-one-year-old Anne Miller was dying of blood poisoning brought on by a severe bacterial infection. Doctors had tried transfusions, surgery, and sulfanomides (the first antimicrobial drugs), but nothing worked, and Miller was deteriorating
fast. Coincidentally, Miller’s doctor, John Bumstead, was also caring for a fellow physician, John Fulton, who had mentioned in passing that his English friend Dr. Howard Florey had developed a powerful new antibiotic called penicillin. Bumstead implored Fulton to get a dose for Miller, and Fulton was able to pull a few strings. The medicine was rushed to New Haven on Saturday, March 14, and Miller recuperated fully. She was the first American treated with penicillin and, it is believed, the first person anywhere saved by it.