Release Thursday, D,. .;ember 15, 1955 An,‑ican Family Features

Thomas S Nicely, aged 12, of Wilson, Va., for his question:

What is aureomycin?

Maybe your life has been saved by medicine called antibiotic. Certainly someone you know has been made well by one or other of these miracle medicines. The word antibiotic means against life, Actually, the healing action is life against life. The life and death warfare is on a scale too small for our eyes to see.

One band of microbes is pitted against another. The battleground, the life to be saved, is a sick human body. The sick body is invaded by a destructive microbe and its relatives. The medicine is also a microbe deadly enemy of the invader, For among the world of microbes there ere friends and allies, opponents and enemies.

Most of the many microbes effect us not at all. Many are our friends. These form precious subs tq noes. ,including vitamins, from the food in our insides. A few are our enemies. When they invade us they cause sickness, high temperatures and poisonings.

Antibiotic medicines are the natural enemies of our germ enemies, They fight our battle for us without harming our bodies. Nowadays antibiotic medicines are injected into patients every day of the week. Yet the first person saved by them less than fifteen years ago. He was a boy with a strap infection, The antibiotic used was penicillin.

The medical world was fascinated with this new idea of germ warfare. But in 1942, Dr. Benjamin W. Duggan was walking sadly home. He had given his last lecture on botany at the University of Wisconsin. For Dr. Ben was 71 years old. The time had come to retire. Thanks to the antibiotic idea, the sad story does not end there,

A few months later, Dr. Ben was back at work for a great research laboratory. For he just happened to be an expert on fungi ‑ mushrooms and such. And the new antibiotic medicines were popping up in minute fungi called molds.

Dr. Hen was seeking for such molds ‑ farm dirt of Wisconsin. And after three years work, experiment number A377 struck pay dirt indeed. A microbe appeared that was a mortal enemy of certain human bugs. For one thing, it was death on parrot fever. Dr. Ben called his little warrior Streptomyoes Aureofasiens. The auro syllable was because the miracle medicine was a golden color.

The new drug took months of purifying and developing before it was ready for market. It was released to doctors in 1947 now under the pronounceable name of aureomycin. Not only will the little golden fighter destroy the bug that causes parrot fever. It is death on certain cholera microbes. And it causes little er if any, damage to the human body for which it goes to war.