The big breakthrough came when people started thinking about dyes.
It, it might sound, might, might sound odd that,
how did dyes have to do with infectious disease treatment?
But dyes were used to stain things, and they started using them and medicine.
And they realized that certain dyes could st,
could stain certain tissues differently.
And there was a specific uptake, this tissue would take up this dye,
this one would take up another dye.
And the idea arose, maybe bacteria could be targeted with specific dyes.
So that's really how the first antibiotics and
antibacterials came about, was looking for dyes that could kill bacteria.
And those were our sulfa drugs.
You might have heard of the drug Bactrim, that is a sulfa drug, and
its progenitors were, were identified using dye studies.
Also arsenic, which was used for syphilis, also arose out of this dye industry.
But really most people think about the,
the dawn of our control of infectious disease with the discovery of penicillin.
It's a very interesting story, and it centers on a man named Alexander Fleming
who was a British scientist who was, was very, very famous.
And what he did is, he had a, a dish of mold, and he left for the weekend,
this is a very famous story, and came back and he looked at that mold.
And, and he realized that that mold had antibacterial properties because some of
the, some of the bacteria had been killed by the, by the effects of that mold.
And that's how he discovered penicillin.
However he didn't put it into action.
He realized that this happened, he published about it, but
he didn't actually take the next step into trying it in human infections.
That was left to, to Howard Florey and Ernst Chain.
And all three of them together won the Nobel Prize.
They actually commercialized penicillin, showed how it could work, and it really
changed the whole way that everybody thought about infectious diseases.
People weren't dying from simple infections any more.
Remember, George Washington died probably from a strep throat infection.