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U.S. History 1877-Present 9.7: The Technology of War–Penicillin 23 Views
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Description:
If someone told you to rub mold on an infection, you'd probably look at them like they had a second head. Well, the world is a strange place, and one particular kind of fungus has actually saved a lot of lives.
Transcript
- 00:03
Turns out the magic bullet during WWII wasn't what it sounds [bullet onstage]
- 00:08
like. Instead, one of the major technological advances that likely made
- 00:11
an Allied victory possible was a fungus: penicillin. Invented, or rather [bullet pulls mushroom out of hat]
- 00:17
accidentally discovered, by Alexander Fleming in 1928, penicillin was the first [penicillin discovered]
- 00:22
antibiotic on the market capable of killing other disease-causing
Full Transcript
- 00:26
microorganisms. It was a great day for humanity and a bad day for microorganisms.
- 00:32
Fleming published his work, but he wasn't able to produce penicillin in mass [microorganisms despair]
- 00:36
quantities. So the scientific world mostly forgot about his discovery... yeah,
- 00:40
great going there, guys. Then, World War II came along and people started [World War II photos]
- 00:44
thinking it would be mighty nice if they had some way to fight infection on the
- 00:48
battlefield. Well, British scientists picked up Fleming's research and came up [scientists recreate penicillin]
- 00:52
with a penicillin injection, but they weren't able to produce it on a large
- 00:56
enough scale for it to make a difference. So, British scientists snuck some of the
- 01:00
wonder mold over to America to take advantage of America's larger laboratory [mold goes west]
- 01:05
infrastructure to get Allied production of penicillin up and running. With a little
- 01:09
poking and prodding by the government, pharmaceutical companies eventually
- 01:12
decided to do their part, and penicillin production skyrocketed from 21 billion
- 01:17
units in 1943 to 1663 billion units in 1944, to over 6 trillion units in 1945. And [penicillin growth chart]
- 01:28
just like, that a miracle drug flooded the market. Yes, it was a flood of mold...
- 01:33
but in this case, the mold was a good thing. The impact of penicillin on the
- 01:37
war and the world can't be overstated. In one fell swoop, thousands of battlefield [penicillin ads]
- 01:41
infections were stopped in their tracks, and since, you know, like the dawn of
- 01:45
time, people have been dying of infections in one way or another that we
- 01:49
don't even pay attention to today. One little scrape that got infected killed
- 01:53
the healthiest people, and just imagine how many soldiers died over the century [people dying of infection]
- 01:58
from wounds. Well, don't imagine their infected wounds, though. That's just too
- 02:02
gross. Some estimate that penicillin saved 3,000 lives at the Battle of Normandy
- 02:07
alone. Its super antibiotic powers kept soldiers from dying from the evils of [Normandy picture]
- 02:12
gangrene, which is an infection that basically rots you to
- 02:15
death. Yep, feel free to gag now. In the end, maybe it wasn't entirely fair to [gangrene diagram... look away]
- 02:19
call penicillin World War II's magic bullet. It was more like the magic anti-
- 02:24
bullet-related-infection drug, but that's less catchy. [penicillin speaks]
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