So I’m planning a trip back to the mid 14th century in the next few weeks, but this whole black death thing has got me down. I can’t bring anything with me and so will have to only use technology that is available in the 1300’s. I’m also not a micro-biologist. Would it be possible for me to formulate and refine penicillin? Ideally I would like to be able to mass produce the stuff so that I can raise an army and conquer Europe by having the only healthy populace around.
Sure. You just need to find (or bring) some Penecillium fungus with you.
But would it be easy to find, identify and purify using primitive technology?
Say you make the drug, how do you deliver it? Can you just swallow pure penicillin? Does it need to be mixed with something to pass through your digestive tract? You would need to bring your own needles if you plan to inject it.
Better take along a physician who knows when to use penicillin and when not to use it. Use it indiscriminately and you’ll give everyone the shits, kill off a certain number of folks who are allergic, and start causing the development of penicillin-resistant strains of bacteria.
Antibiotics are precise tools, which can be lifesaving when used in the right amount for the right situation for the proper amount of time. They’re no cure-all.
Pfffft. Seems like someone just wants a free trip to the 14th century…
Penicillin wouldn’t be your best choice. Some of the best production tricks – finding the best strain in a particular moldy cantaloupe, and the use of corn steep liquor as a nitrogen source require the existence of field known as biochemistry, and people of the 1300’s just aren’t there yet to help you. Also, as above, dosage and preparation are also issues of expertise you don’t have.
However, sulfanilamide might be more useful for your application. The steps to produce it aren’t beyond the techniques of the alchemists. You have the benefit of the formula, they won’t find it on their own, not without the scientific method, which they don’t really get yet. Formulating it to be an ingestible medicine, to protect you from Black Death, can be a problem, because it doesn’t dissolve easily. However, your soldiers, when wounded, can be instructed to just sprinkle the power on their wounds, as soldiers were told to do during WWII. Your army will survive wounds better, and this heretofore unknown concern for your mercenary force will endear you to them, and the conquered populace. Point is, you don’t have to be stuck with Penicillin, just because you know its produced by a mold, you have many other choices.
I read a bit of the research behind the 1632 series (synopsis: A modern West Virginia town is mysteriously transported back to the middle of the Thirty Years War) on this topic. Basically, there are a bunch of different kinds of molds which produce a bunch of different kinds of interesting compounds. Some of them are effective against some strains of bacteria, and some are not. Some of them are toxic to humans, and some are not. Finding any that’s good against bacteria but won’t hurt humans takes a lot of hard work, and even if you happen to have genuine penicillin in one of your Petri dishes (you probably don’t), you’d have no way of knowing it.
What the folks in the story end up mostly using instead is chloramphenicol, which can be manufactured from dead hydrocarbons, and which is actually even broader spectrum than penicillin. The reason it’s not used much any more is that it’s got about a 1 in 10,000 chance of unavoidable death from side effects, but compared to plague, those are very good odds.