I was at the gym tonight and one of the clerks was eating bread and she suddenly says “Ew, there’s mold on this bread, isn’t mold toxic? Am I gonna die?” Her coworker said “No, unless you’re deathly allergic to mold, you’ll be fine.”
I do realize there are all kinds of mold, and I’ve accidently eaten moldy bread, but as we all know Penicillin was discovered by moldy bread.
So I got to thinking would it be possible to make a simple antibiotic from bread mold? Or another kind of antibiotic from something else?
Well, you could, but you are going to need an awful lot of bread.
Penicillin mould does not make much penicillin, and you need to isolate the penicillin from the broth. As I recall, during the first use of penicillin, the medical team could recover penicillin faster from the urine of the patient than from the mould growing vats.
Antibiotics have generally been synthesised since the early 50s.
If memory serves, the penicillin mold was a very specific strain. To process it into the drug was fairly tricky, I believe it involved extracting the mold in a liquid medium, then separating out one specific set of chemicals. Not sure what the liquid medium was [it could range from water, through alcohol through some other fairly toxic solvent] or how they separated out the active ingredient [could have been as easy as spinning it up in a centrifuge and slurping out a specific layer all the way through drying the product, and extracting it with a different solvent, there are so many ways to process botanicals]
I do know that in the early years of penicillin, it was hard enough to get in bulk that the urine was saved and the penicillin was distilled back out of it and used again …
Many herbs and spices have powerful antibiotic properties. Hot peppers, garlic, ginger, thyme, allspice, oregano, and many more have been used for centuries for their antibiotic powers.
There doesn’t seem to be a practical way for you to make your own supplemental antibiotics, which you can ingest or inject like traditional medications. Additionally, I think you might have stopped just short of actually begging the question, because the debate over the effective use of antibiotics has begun to infect the medical community. Too often they are used to shorten the duration of bacterial infections (when the body would beat the infection anyway), and/or they are used when a viral infection is misdiagnosed as a bacterial infection. They are prescribed as ‘just in case’ meds, too… prior to even dental surgery. So, wanting your own way of making antibiotics is begging the question, to me, because it sort of makes the argument that it’d be beneficial to have antibiotics at your disposal. Overuse has helped bacteria evolve at a rapid pace and made the elite of elite bacteria the survivors, without competition from the other more drug-susceptible bacteria. Additionally, the damage to the good/beneficial bacteria in the human body has ramifications not yet fully understood. Do they contribute to some cancers, heart problems, digestive disorders, arthritis? More to come.
If you read a little more about the history of antibiotics, you will probably find it all very interesting:
There are plenty of naturaly occuring complex molecules that can kill bacteria. It is unlikely, however, that the quantities used in spicing our food have any effect in fighting bacterial infection. It is a pretty big stretch to take a result from a petri dish and assume it is useful medicinaly. The petri dish is step one in the process. Maybe there is some effect in preventing food spoilage. Mostly I think they are used as a strong flavor to overpower the taste of spoiled food.
I read that the mold on cantaloupe was discovered in the 40s to have the best quality for making penicillin.
I was just speculating to eat a bunch of moldy cantaloupe to get antibiotics. OK it’s more than a little weird to think of that, especially since actual penicillin is so cheap, it’s interesting to speculate