existence many of these soil creatures protect themselves by producing a chemical which can kill or inhibit the growth of other organisms. This chemical we know as an antibiotic. Discovery of the antibiotics, and their application a few years ago to the war on disease bacteria, marked the beginning of a new era in medicine.
Penicillin's remarkable success launched a worldwide hunt for medicine in the soil. Today a new "prospector" searches the mountains, the river beds and the baekyards for new antibiotic wonder drugs, more precious than gold, which may bring an end to diseases llke polio, cancer, the common cold--the conquest of which has remained elusively beyond the grasp of medical science.
The search is a needle-in-the-haystack story. Travelers, missionaries, and airline pilots have brought back hundreds of thousands of soil samples for study. Millions of molds derived from these samples have been screened and yet, only about 300 new antibiotics have been found. Less than a dozen are considered safe enough and effective enough to be prescribed. And just five, including penicillin, are in wide clinical use.
However--and this provides medical science with the incentive for further searching--this mere handful of antibiotics has been able to halt or sharply reduce the incidence of the great majority of diseases.
These few wonder drugs, alone or in combinations, have proved effective in various degrees against such diseases as trachoma, typhus, the venereals, pinworm, pulmonary tuberculosis, meningitis, yaws, typhoid fever, the pneumonias, and dysentery, to name but a few. The antibiotic terramycin alone has been used effectively in the treatment of more than 80 diseases, many of which, just a decade ago, were in the "often fatal" category.
But the antibiotics are not limited solely to the battle against disease. Significant as their medical usefulness is, still another powerful role was destined for these chemicals. Animal nutrition experts in the universities found that the growth of poultry and livestock was markedly accelerated by feed supplements containing such antibiotics as penicillin and terramycin. New evidence of the power of the antibiotics came to light recently with the development of Terralac, a synthetic sow's milk incorporating terramycin. Little pigs fed Terralac weigh twice as much at the eight-week weaning age as sow-fed piglets. That means more meat, cheaper and faster. It is not inconceivable that this growth-stimulating property may eventually be made applicable to human needs.
Current research is also revealing the possibility of using antibiotics to solve many industrial problems that may be of bacterial, viral, or fungal origin. Antibiotics like thiolutin may be the answer to deterioration--in textiles, leather, paints, plastics, electrical equipment. Diseases of plants may also succumb to the antibiotics. The possible elimination of food spoilage presents still another challenge to the efficacy of the wonder drugs.
Where in the world do you find the "right" soil for a new antibiotic? If Igl