• Question: when was antibiotics created and who created them

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      Asked by Ria to ☣ Danna, Lindsay, Juan, Jonny, Daniela ? on 10 Jun 2016.
      • Photo: Danna Gifford

        Danna Gifford answered on 10 Jun 2016:


        Most people would say that Alexander Fleming “created” the first antibiotic in 1928, but it was more like he “discovered” that it was produced by a fungus. Most of the antibiotics we use today were found by looking at the stuff microbes (that’s bacteria and fungi) make to kill each other. Once we figured out what antibiotics they make, and how they make them, we figured out how to make antibiotics in the large amounts needed to use for medicine.

        Fun fact: anthropologists found that people may have been using antibiotics as many as 1600 years ago. They found small amounts of the antibiotic called “tetracycline” in the bones of skeletons from the Dakhleh Oasis in Egypt. The same skeletons had almost no signs of bone infections, compared to other skeletons of the same age. The people were probably eating grain had a bacterium called “Streptomyces” growing on it. Streptomyces bacteria produce tetracycline naturally.

      • Photo: Jonathan Hunter

        Jonathan Hunter answered on 10 Jun 2016:


        I guess if you want to get technical, plants were created antibiotics before we did. The majority of antibiotics come from plants, fungi, corals, etc.
        When people want new antibiotics they tend to take a lot of inspiration from nature.

      • Photo: Lindsay Robinson

        Lindsay Robinson answered on 11 Jun 2016:


        Antibiotics have existed forever in plants and fungus. It often takes someone intelligent who thinks a bit differently to realise what you can do with them. The man who did that was Alexander Fleming in 1928 but even he was building on the work of other scientists.

      • Photo: Juan Ortiz

        Juan Ortiz answered on 11 Jun 2016:


        As Lindsay and Jonathan said, antibiotics were already there before humans get to discover them and humans have been using them for thousands of years without understanding how they worked o what they were. People only knew that they cured their infections. But when did people get to know what was going on? It was in 1877 when the scientists Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch realised that some type of bacteria could prevent the growth of other type of bacteria. Then Louis Pasteur thought that this could be useful to treat infections. And it was in 1942 when Selman Waksman named ANTIBIOTICS these substances produced by some microbes to kill others.

      • Photo: Daniela Lobo

        Daniela Lobo answered on 16 Jun 2016:


        I agree with the answer saying that some plants, fungi, … are the first original creators of antibiotics. It has their way of protecting themselves against bacteria. We just happened to be curious and lucky to observe that, and mimic nature!

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