Every year scientists open more doors that lead to the secrets of
new beneficent drugs.
There is bacitracin, which was discovered by two scientists at
Columbia University''s College of Physicians and Surgeons. These two
people, Dr. Frank Meleney and Miss Balbina Johnson, knowing that the
human body had some kind of action in itself with which it fights
infections, began to search for the chemical that does this. In the
hospital they examined badly infected wounds of people who had been
hurt in accidents and made tests of the blood and the infected tissue.
Finally, in the wound of a girl who had broken a leg bone, they
found the useful germs which seemed to be fighting the poisonous
infection. They took some of these into the laboratory and from them
developed cultures; that is, larger masses of the germs with which to
experiment. At last, after long and painstaking work, they were able
to draw from these germs a substance which is a germ destroyer. Dr.
Meleney and Miss Johnson named it bacitracin-baci because the germ is,
in scientific language, a bacillus and tracin for Margaret Tracy,
whose broken leg supplied the germ.
Bacitracin at first was used only locally; later the drug was
developed into a solution that can be used to fight germ through the
blood stream.