In March 1942, 33-year-old Anne Miller lay delirious in New Haven Hospital, deathly ill from septicemia that she developed following a miscarriage a month before. During her stay at the Connecticut hospital, doctors tried every cure imaginable — from sulfa drugs to blood transfusions — as her temperature at times spiked past 106 degrees.
“She was just incurable,” Eric Lax, author of “The Mold in Dr. Florey’s Coat,” said in a phone interview. “It was like somebody today with covid-19 who is going down the tubes.”
Desperate, her doctors acquired a tablespoon of an experimental drug and gave her an injection. Overnight, her temperature dropped. A day later, she was up and eating again.
The miracle drug that saved her life? A virtually unknown substance called penicillin.
As researchers around the world chase a vaccine and treatments for the novel coronavirus, the quest echoes the race to mass-produce penicillin in the United States and Britain during World War II.
In the days before antibiotics, something as simple as a scratch or even a blister could get infected and lead to death. Before the beginning of the 20th century, the average life expectancy was 47 years, even in the industrialized world, according to the National Institutes of Health. Infectious diseases such as smallpox, cholera, diphtheria and pneumonia cut life short. No treatment existed for them.
Scottish biologist Alexander Fleming had discovered the penicillin mold in London in 1928. Fleming attempted to extract the mold’s active substance that fought bacteria but was unsuccessful, and he gave up experimentation, according to Lax’s book.
As war broke out in Europe in 1939, Australian doctor Howard Florey obtained funding from the Rockefeller Foundation in New York to study Fleming’s discovery further at the University of Oxford. Along with brash German emigre Ernst Chain, and meticulous assistant Norman Heatley, he worked to generate penicillin’s active ingredient.
But in the course of their research, Florey confronted an obstacle: Extracting the active ingredient from the mold was terribly difficult. Time after time, the delicate mold would dissolve in the process of extraction, leaving scientists frustrated.
The tablespoon of penicillin that cured Anne Miller represented half the entire amount of the antibiotic available in the United States in 1942. To give her a full treatment, doctors had to collect her urine, extract the remaining penicillin from it at about 70 percent potency, and re-inject it, according to Lax’s book.