Contents - IADR/AADR

Penicillin, by the demands of World War II, was manufactured in quantity at the Department of Agriculture in
Peoria, Illinois, through the deep-tank fermentation method and through the addition to the culture medium of
corn steep liquor. In 1942 there was hardly enough penicillin to treat one hundred patients, but by the end of the
year there was a sufficient quantity for all the Armed Forces and their allies. The first civilian patient treated in
the United States was a thirty-three-year-old housewife who in 1944 became ill with sepsis due to b-hemolytic
streptococcus from inevitable abortion. She recovered under penicillin therapy. By 1958 some 375 tons of
penicillin were put to use. The semisynthetic penicillins, congeners of penicillin, were conceived because of the
inactivation of penicillin by penicillinase-producing microbes. Methicillin, oxacillin, cloxacillin, nafcillin, and
ampicillin all have a broader spectrum of antibacterial activity than penicillin.
Contemporary with this brilliant work was the equally important uncovering of streptomycin. Between
1939 and 1943, Selman Waksman, a soil microbiologist from Rutgers University, disclosed antibiotics in the
soil actinomyces. By 1944 he and his associates 10 had isolated streptomycin and found it effective against
brucellosis, Listeria infections, and Shigella and Escherichia coli infections. So effective was it against the
tubercle bacillus that the morbidity and mortality of the dreaded tuberculosis fell appreciably, tuberculosis
sanitariums were less needed, and tuberculosis was treated in the clinic and the office. An array of potent drugs
flowed from laboratories studying soil bacteria: bacitracin, chloramphenicol, polymyxin, chlortetracycline,
cephalosporin, neomycin, oxytetracycline, nystatin, erythromycin, tetracycline, novobiocin, cycloserine,
vancomycin, ristocetin, kanamycin, griseofulvin, and lincocin. Ehrlich's magic bullets had indeed been brought
forth. The death rate from infection and parasites in England and Wales was reduced from 1600 per million
living to 180 per million living in 1957. The years 1920 to 1970 were, indeed, years of the conquest of bacterial
disease.
ORAL CONTRACEPTION
Two active substances in the ovary were defined in the 1920s: the one, estrogen, varying in amounts
during menstruation and pregnancy, and the other, progesterone, present in the corpus luteum. The folliclestimulating
hormone and the lutein hormone were traced to the pituitary. Diethylstilbestrol was one of the
several estrogens used for menopause, dysmenorrhea, ovarian dysgenesis, osteoporosis, and cancer of the
prostate. Recognition of the use of progestin for the inhibition of ovulation led to the discovery of an effective
oral contraceptive agent. In 1955 Rock, Pincus, and Garcia 11 gave the combination of norethylnodrel with
mestranol to large numbers of women in San Juan and Humacao, Puerto Rico, and in Port-au-Prince, Haiti,
giving the drug from the fifth to the twenty-fifth day of the menstrual cycle. The rate of pregnancy was
appreciably reduced. What a boon to womanhood!
Primary hypertension affected 5 percent of the population. Although its pathogenesis has not been well
INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR DENTAL RESEARCH (IADR) – THE FIRST FIFTY YEAR HISTORY PAGE 13