…She asks as she sucks down another 500mg.
I have this picture in my head of a vast conspiracy between bakers and the drug industry, where the price of a loaf of pumpernickel is artificially high cos they siphon off entire ovenloads of the stuff to warehouses, where the bread is allowed to mold, and then slave-labor-illegal-immigrants are forced to scrape off the mold with dull butter knives.
That’s obviously not the case, else 60 Minutes would have uncovered this years ago.
So…how?
Penicillium notatum is self-replenishing. Give it a nice home with plenty to eat and it just grows like crazy. No truckloads of bread or illegal immigrants necessary.
In the early 1940’s, production was time consuming. For every million parts of culture medium, only a few parts penicillin was yielded. Luckily (sort of), WW2 was right around the corner. With this, penicillin production would soon be considered a war project and thus receive large amount of federal funding.
After more than a year, Penicillium notatum was dropped in favor of P. chrysogeum (which is a fruit or veggie mold), which was hundreds of times more prolific in terms of penicillin yield. But this was still not enough. Fiddling with mutations brought about via exposure to x-rays finally resulted in a spore that could produce over a thousand times more penicillin than the original P. chrysogeum.
The final challenge was creating a suitable environment for all of those little buggers to grow & make our penicillin for us. Molds need exposure to air in order to grow, so the nutrient tanks could only produce as much penicillin as could be “scraped off the surface”. In the mid-40’s, tanks were developed that allowed for a large surface area of P. notatum to be efficiently airated. Soon thereafter, dozens of pounds of penicillin were being produced, and as various different pharmaceutical companies began to jump on the bandwagon, over 5 million people each year were receiving the new wonder drug. Among other things, the death rate (from pneumonia) during WW2 was 1/20[sup]th[/sup] of what it was during WW1.
I believe quite a bit of it is now also made artifically - through just plain ol’ chemistry.
[nitpick]
That’s like calling Heisenberg’s work “plain old quantum mechanics” !
John Sheehan’s synthesis required nearly 15 years of scientific effort to achieve.
[/nitpick]
Well, yeah. But I mean rather than through biology, which as we all know is the only true science… 
Oh, bummer. Vats of mold aren’t nearly as interesting as a drug/baking company conspiracy.
Thanks anyhow 
Well, vats of mold would be interesting if you saw them as giant brains, plotting the demise of everything with a complex cellular structure!
nooooooooooooooooo!!!
The drugs are supposed to be HELPING me!
Aren’t they?
listens to the crickets
[sup]Hep me! Hep me!!!
I have told my dentist that the worst part of going to see him is not even the drilling, it’s the humiliating lectures about how I should brush more often and take better care of my teeth etc…
Lately he prescribed me amoxicillin and every time I go back I have to explain why I haven’t started taking it yet (same reason I don’t brush as often as I should: lazyness)
I looked in the refrigerator and wondered of eating moldy cheese might work … or at least save me from the dreaded lecture. “No, Mr dentist, I did not take the amoxicillin you prescribed but I took some moldy cheese instead”…
I do believe female hormone replacement therapy is still made from horse piss, though.
Premarin from mare’s urine. Get it?