Word: streptomycin
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...French-born Dr. Dubos should go much of the credit for sparking the development of antibiotics-among them streptomycin, first and still the best of the "miracle drugs" which fight TB. But in The White Plague (Little. Brown; $4), Rene and Jean Dubos urge mankind to stop thinking of the disease in terms of drugs and individual patients: "Tuberculosis is a social disease and presents problems that transcend the conventional medical approach . . . The impact of social and economic factors [must] be considered as much as the mechanisms by which tubercle bacilli cause damage to the human body. On the other...
Microbiologist Selman Abraham Waksman (TIME, Nov. 7, 1949), 64, for his discovery of streptomycin...
Researchers at the University of California have found that there are about as many cases of antagonism between the drugs as there are of cooperation. By & large, they report, any two of four antibiotics in Group I-penicillin, streptomycin, bacitracin and neomycin-work well together. Except in rare cases, however, none of these four should be used with an antibiotic from Group II: aureomycin, Chloromycetin, terramycin. And while no great harm may come of combining two antibiotics within Group II, no real advantage can be expected either; the combination simply works like a bigger dose of either drug alone...
...causing microbe and be useless against another closely related microbe. Fortunately, the exceptional cases in which drugs from Groups I and II should be used together are those which have often proved hardest to treat-where a strain of bacteria shows extreme resistance to a widely used antibiotic like streptomycin. But even in these cases laboratory tests have proved better than guesswork...
Other companies did, and got into penicillin faster. But Merck got a head start with the next antibiotic, streptomycin. When Rutgers' Dr. Selman Waksman found that his beloved soil bacteria had made something that killed many germs which penicillin did not affect, he took the culture to Rahway. Though half a dozen companies are making streptomycin today, the best guess is that Merck microbes, in their own temple of vats at Elkton, Va., make 40% of the U.S. output...