Re:A Woman Who Lives 200k Years in the Past
by jdm2212 on Thursday April 02, 2020 @10:01PM
(#22765746)
> When penicillin was first isolated in 1928, there was so little demand for it that it took over a decade before anyone even bothered working on a way to commercialize it.
That's false. Penicillin was discovered in 1928. It took until 1940 for researchers to show it could cure infections. It was put to use in a human the next year, and Fleming won the Nobel Prize in 1945.
Infections that could be cured by penicillin (staph and strep) were on their own never a leading cause of death, and so you wouldn't expect penicillin on its own to drive big life expectancy improvements.
We've had effective antibiotics for thousands of years. When penicillin was first isolated in 1928, there was so little demand for it that it took over a decade before anyone even bothered working on a way to commercialize it. It wasn't particularly difficult to commercialize, but no one actually cared.
Modern antibiotics are mostly only necessary if you get shot or you're a burn victim or something, which is why no one cared until WWII. Also, some of the berberine plants that were used before that were starting to become less common around that time.
If we didn't have effective antibiotics before penicillin then human life expectancy would have gone way up after the discovery of penicillin. But looking at the data, it's pretty obvious that that didn't actually happen. Pretty much every scientific paper agrees with this, e.g.:
https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/pdf/10.2105/AJPH.66.12...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8007898