Synthetic Penicillin?

If sleuthing doctors are right, chemists may soon know how to make penicillin synthetically--and penicillin is desperately scarce. This speculation popped out of a report to the American Chemical Society, in which Manhattan's Drs. Gustav J. Martin and C. Virginia Fisher observed that penicillin seems to act much like the acridine group of drugs which deprive bacteria of oxygen. The doctors even guessed that penicillin may turn out to be a member of this group which can be manufactured easily.

The acridines were the wonder drugs of World War I--but the doctors did not know it. When they were introduced in 1917, surgeons were prejudiced against using chemicals in wounds, because the wound antiseptics then in use were too caustic. But World War II doctors have taken up the acridines again. Last year Major G. A. G.Mitchell and Lieut. Colonel G. A. H. Buttle of the Royal Army Medical Corps used proflavine, now the most popular acridine, on 80 serious wounds in North Africa, reported in the Lancet that "proflavine has proved more effective in controlling or eliminating the infection than any other drug. . . so far tried." (They had already tried sulfa drugs.)

Drs. Martin and Fisher also talked about a new extract of penicillium mold, penicillin B (the original penicillin must henceforth be called penicillin A). Penicillin B's attack is exactly opposite to A's--it supplies bacteria with too much oxygen. The two should never be used together, as they might cancel each other out. Researchers at St. Louis University who isolated the new penicillin B claim that it is ten times as effective as penicillin A, but even rarer.

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