- Person
- Ernst Chain
- Lived
- 1906–1979
- Field
- Biochemistry
- From
- German-British
The story
Alexander Fleming had described penicillin about a decade earlier, but he had not shown that it could cure an infection inside a living body, and most scientists regarded it as an unstable laboratory curiosity. At Oxford, Howard Florey and Ernst Chain, a Jewish biochemist who had fled Nazi Germany in 1933, decided in 1938 to study antibacterial substances made by micro-organisms, penicillin among them. Chain and the chemist Edward Abraham then worked out how to purify and concentrate it.
In March 1940 Chain hurried to the laboratory that kept test animals and asked for two mice to be injected with penicillin he and Abraham had extracted. The dose was far higher than in Fleming's earlier experiment, yet the mice survived apparently unharmed. The concentrated penicillin had passed its first toxicity test.
Florey then directed the crucial step that Fleming had never taken: testing whether penicillin could cure an infection in a living animal. On 25 May 1940 eight mice were injected with haemolytic streptococci, bacteria that among other diseases cause puerperal fever in new mothers. Four of them then received measured, timed doses of penicillin; the other four were left untreated as controls.
Sixteen and a half hours later the four treated mice were alive and the untreated ones were dead. The Science History Institute records that the result caused great excitement among the researchers. Further tests involving hundreds of mice followed through the summer of 1940, and on 24 August Florey and Chain reported their findings in The Lancet, a paper that electrified research groups around the world.
The experiment was small, but its logic was powerful: a carefully controlled comparison showing that the drug, and nothing else, made the difference between life and death. It opened the way to the first human trials in early 1941 and to the vast wartime effort to mass-produce penicillin. In 1945 Chain, Florey and Fleming shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery of penicillin and its curative effect in infectious diseases. Those four surviving mice marked the beginning of the antibiotic age.
Why it matters
This simple experiment proved that penicillin could cure deadly bacterial infections inside the body, the turning point that led to its use in people.
About Ernst Chain
Berlin-born Jewish refugee biochemist who purified penicillin with Howard Florey at Oxford, turning Fleming’s curiosity into a life-saving drug, and shared the 1945 Nobel Prize.
More about Ernst Chain
- Ernst Chain proposed penicillin's beta-lactam ringIn 1942 Ernst Chain and Edward Abraham proposed that penicillin contains a beta-lactam ring, a structure Dorothy Hodgkin confirmed by X-ray crystallography in 1945.
- Ernst Chain founded biochemistry at Imperial CollegeAfter building a research centre in Rome, Ernst Chain returned to Britain in 1964 to found Imperial College London's biochemistry department, specialising in fermentation technology.
- Ernst Chain's 1940 Lancet paper electrified medicineOn August 24, 1940, Florey, Chain and their Oxford colleagues reported penicillin's curative power in The Lancet, a paper that electrified researchers around the world.
- Ernst Chain worked out how to purify penicillinAt Oxford, Ernst Chain and Edward Abraham found a way to purify and concentrate penicillin, turning Fleming's fragile mould juice into a usable drug.
Sources
- Howard Walter Florey and Ernst Boris Chain Science History Institute
- Ernst Boris Chain Wikipedia
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