Why Was Penicillin Important

Penicillin would be used to treat infections that wounded and ill soldiers suffered during World War II. This proved that penicillin had a vital importance to save lives. Penicillin prevented thousands of wartime deaths. After the attack on Pearl Harbor by Japan on December 7, 1941, it became clear that a mass amount of penicillin needed to be produced in order to win the war. The U.S. was able to produce 2.3 million portions of penicillin in order to prepare for the D-Day invasion of Normandy. Penicillin soon was known as the “miracle drug” of the war, curing diseases and saving the lives of millions. The discovery of penicillin changed the lives of everyone on the globe, but it also changed the course of medicine. With the development of penicillin, diseases that were once seen as fatal, such as bacterial meningitis and pneumococcal pneumonia, finally had an easy, treatable, solution. In the 1930s pneumococcal pneumonia would be treated with antisera and sulfonamides. These were a
form of blood serum that was given to the patient. Instead of destroying the bacteria, these would slowly push the bacteria to certain parts of the body to allow the immune system to do its job. This was not an effective method, and these treatments halted as soon as penicillin was introduced. After seeing the success of penicillin pharmaceutical industries began to test other types of natural products for antibacterial activity. This lead to a mass of new antibiotics, some of which are streptomycin, aminoglycosides, tetracycline. Penicillin paved the way for these new medicines. There is one traumatic event that occurred during this time period, known as the Holocaust. This event had a tremendous effect on the ethics of medicine. The Holocaust was the systematic annihilation of over six million Jews and other groups that the Nazis saw as inferior to them, during World War II. The horrors that happened to the Jews made people rethink their ethics in all aspects of life. The use of brutal human experimentation on Jews during the Holocaust changed the ethics of medicine. Nazi doctors and physicians would perform brutal and more than often deadly experiments on over seven thousand victims of the Holocaust, such as Jews, Poles, Gypsies, homosexuals, political prisoners, or anyone else, that the Nazis found ‘inferior’ without their consent. Every experiment that would be performed on the prisoners fell into three different categories, military research, pharmaceutical or radically motivated research. The military research was aimed at ensuring the survival and rescue of the German military groups. Such experiments consisted of finding cures for injuries found in the war, testing for drinkable water on gypsies, freezing prisoners for hypothermia research, high-altitude simulation experiments to find benefits for pilots and more. The pharmaceutical research was the testing of medical procedures and pharmaceuticals that would cure or treat the illnesses and diseases that were a threat to the German public and military. German physicians would test for cures of illnesses such as smallpox, tuberculosis, typhus, typhoid fever, yellow fever, malaria, and hepatitis, common diseases in Germany during this time. They would also perform tests for poisonous gasses, such as mustard and phosgene gas, sulfanilamide drugs, and bone-grafts. The final type of tests that would be performed were experiments to prove and confirm that Aryans are the ideal race. The debate on human experimentation is long standing. The intensely debated question is, “do the ends justify the means?” Yes, the Nazi experiments were cruel and horrific, and nobody should ever have to go through that, but, the discoveries made in the camps could have potentially lead to new scientific breakthroughs. When the idea of human experimentation became popular in the 20th century, there was no debate, and the subjects became known as “animals of necessity”. With the positive results, appearing as new vaccines, and antibiotics that would treat many diseases, human experimentation had the public’s full support. But, when it became known that there was not full consent given by the subject, the public’s trust of the product was not as firm, and the support of human experimentation began to ebb. The Nazi experiments were as unethical and immoral as experiments can get. Death was the likely result of the subject. Sterile environments were nonexistent, and the main goal of the experiment was to see how much pain the subjects could endure before dying. It was clear that there was not a moral aspect of the human experiments in which the Nazis were conducting, and as a result, the Nuremberg Code of 1947 was established.
The Nuremberg Code was established after the Nuremberg Trials, and it is a set of research ethics principles for human experimentation. These principles explain what should and should not be acceptable in terms of human experimentation. This is one of the only positive outcomes of the Nazi medical program. A few criteria for ethical experimentation are that, the subject must give full consent in participating in the experiment, there has to be a solid basis for the experiment, and the experiment must be conducted to avoid all unnecessary physical and mental suffering. These examples highlight three of the points in the code, but all of the others are establishing the same thing, a humane and ethical experiment. After the Nuremberg Code was established, we have yet to hear of brutal experiments as extreme as the
Nazis. The changes in medicine during World War II had a significant impact on the world during the war and even today. The injuries that soldiers sustained in war actually forced the world into creating new medicines. The discoveries during this time of medicine such as penicillin saved millions of lives of soldiers and civilians, and today we still heavily rely on this medicine nearly 70 years after the war. The Nazi experiments also brought up new ideas about ethics, after seeing the experiments, there was a plan created to ensure that human survival always comes before scientific discoveries. Even after the war, the course of medicine will always continue to change.