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Saloni
@scientificdiscovery.dev

You may have heard that it took a long time for penicillin to be scaled up. What about other antibiotics? How long did it take for them to be mass produced and introduced clinically, after they were discovered? I created a visualization of this here:

Saloni
@scientificdiscovery.dev

Thank you, so interesting! I was reading earlier about how it was discovered by Waksman and then-PhD student Albert Schatz. It seems Schatz was drafted into WWII while working on the project. He returned to the lab a few months later after an injury, and then discovered streptomycin.

journals.asm.orgSelman A. Waksman, Winner of the 1952 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine | Applied and Environmental MicrobiologyABSTRACT The history of the discovery and development of streptomycin is reviewed here from the personal standpoint of a member of Dr. Selman Waksman's antibiotic screening research team. The team app...

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Saloni
@scientificdiscovery.dev

Strange to imagine what it might have been like if he hadn't returned - maybe someone else in Waksman's lab would have discovered it, but a while later? I hadn't read about the problems with scaling it up for trials though, really interesting