Mentioned 11 times on 3 shows.
“for a couple of decades. What caused it to stop, and you talk about the progress of science, was the discovery of penicillin, which was a real magic bullet. So once you had penicillin, you weren't going to continue treating people with malaria.”
“By the way, these are definitive examples of progress in medicine. Absolutely. Penicillin, making sure there's no germs in zerosurgery. So these are all just refreshingly clear examples of progress.”
“Sometimes it comes in big steps. Penicillin, I think, was a huge step. I was lucky enough to grow up in the era when penicillin and other antibiotics became widely available.”
“Again, World War II. greatly accelerates things, not least because we discover a real magic bullet called penicillin and then the other antibiotics that we subsequently come across. Penicillin had been observed by Alexander Fleming in his famously in his lab in some Gipetri tube, Petri dishes where bacteria had been killed.”
“It was really Harold Florey and his team at Oxford who developed the therapeutic potential of penicillin. And actually, Flory threw some of it in his jacket across the Atlantic to America.”
“And it was Americans that solved the critical thing. It took Florey and his team weeks to develop enough penicillin to treat a single mouse. What America learned how to do was mass produce penicillin.”
“small molecules designed to poison, disable, or starve their bacterial competitors. We already had one famous example. Penicillin, discovered by Alexander Fleming, is exactly that kind of weapon, a chemical that a fungus uses to kill bacteria.”
“actually an antenna. So this is the process that takes to great life. And 70 years ago, we started a new era of humanity called the antibiotic era. And it innovated with penicillin in the 1940s. But then it became herbicides and pesticides and took us into a massive journey of destroying biosis.”
“And so the 1950s, you'll remember we had penicillin in late World War II. So penicillin was the first direct antibiotic. And it was a revolution. It was so exciting. So kids in the 1940s and 50s were getting an injection in their butt for anything, common cold, sneeze, red eyes, penicillin.”
“And we would finally become healthy again. Right. But if people did get infected with syphilis back then, antibiotics like penicillin would cure them. It would. So it would eliminate the symptom of syphilis. But syphilis wasn't a disease. Syphilis was a symptom of a degradation of healthy biologic interconnected relationships.”
“And if you're a person who works with animals, with horses, with cows... I only knew it was cattle. It is a dewormer, but that's like saying penicillin is a veterinary medicine. No. Well, they use penicillin on animals. They also use penicillin on humans. It's like... It's medicine. We're mammals.”