The history of this antibiotic shows, had animal testing been trusted in the first place, that penicillin would have not been available during World War II. Again, it was a lucky strike that the results hinging on animal tests did not delay introduction of penicillin on the battlefields. Such delay would have inevitably resulted in the death of counltess wounded soldiers and civilians with no access to antibiotics.
In 1929, Alexander Fleming saw that bacterial colonies could not grow in a Petri dish where penicillin was excreted by the fungus that was growing on it. He tested this new substance on rabbits but did not work since the molecule is cleared from the animal before it exerts its therapeutic action, and it is highly toxic in guinea pigs. As a consequence, he then put it away thinking that it had no effect in humans.
Still, other scientists at Oxford several years later followed up on his work and successfully tried on mice and stated: "Mice were tried in the initial toxicity tests because of their small size, but what a lucky chance it was, for in this respect man is like the mouse and not the guinea pig."
"If we had used guinea pigs exclusively we should have said that the penicillin was toxic, and we probably should not have proceeded to try to overcome the difficulties of producing the substance for trial in man." Fleming later tested again on a sick patient and this time it worked. He reported: "How fortunate we didn't have the animal tests in the 1940 for penicillin would have probably never been granted a license, and possibly the whole field of antibiotics might never have been realised." (1)
1. ALTA. 22: 207-209 (1994), See also the report of the discovery of penicillin in "The alarming history of Medicine" by Richard Gordon, ed. Sinclair and Stevenson (1993)
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