Sulfanilamide Antibiotics Bacterial intruders Commentary

Paul Gelmo, Gerhard Domagk pharmacology

Sulfanilamide

• Paul Gelmo made a sulfanilamide
• for his doctoral work in 1908
• and patented it the following year
• but was not aware that it worked as an antibiotic.
• A team led by Gerhard Domagk at Bayer,
• observing that certain dyes stained bacteria
• but not healthy tissue,
• for five years created dyes and tested them as antibiotics.
• Eventually, they found the sulfonamide Prontosil
• worked against streptococcus bacteria.
• Domagk didn’t realize until later
• that Prontosil metabolized in the body
• into a sulfanilamide,
• which Gelmo had already patented.
• Domagk used it to cure his own daughter
• who otherwise would have lost her arm.
• It cured president FDR’s twenty-two-year-old son
• of his strep throat,
• and clinical trials in Europe were also successful
• so that Prontosil became widely used—
• the first commercial antibiotic.

Antibiotics

• Paul Gelmo didn’t invent antibiotics.
• Ancient Greeks and Egyptians used
• certain molds to treat infections.
• Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch in 1877
• obseved antibiosis among bacteria.
• Alexander Fleming in 1928 discovered
• the mold that produced penicillin
• although methods for purifying penicillin
• weren’t available until after 1945.

Bacterial intruders

• Suffering you don’t deserve
• inflicted as aching, nausea, fever.
• Your body puts survival ahead of comfort,
• as it reacts against the intruders.
• If your gravy boat were to arrive
• you wouldn’t feel like getting on.
• Thoughts of gravy, even thoughts
• of being well, remind you of diarrhea.
• Shall only the fittest survive,
• and shall the weak be undefended?
• Humans might merely be means
• for bacteria to populate the planet.