1945 - Medicine

Medicine

Penicillin is introduced on a commercial basis following work by a large Anglo-American research team (see 1944), but Alexander Fleming warns that misuse of the antibiotic could lead to the propagation of mutant forms of bacteria that can resist it. By next year, an estimated 14 percent of the staphylococcus strains isolated from patients in a London hospital will be resistant, some patients will be allergic to penicillin, and scientists will seek alternative antibiotics (see synthesis, 1946).

Streptomycin is introduced commercially (see 1944). It will be followed by erythromycin, tetracycline, amoxicillin, and more than 100 other antibiotics.

Washington State-born biochemist George (Herbert) Hitchings, 40, and his colleague Gertrude Elion pioneer a new biochemical approach to chemotherapy. Working at a Burroughs Wellcome laboratory in North Carolina, Hitchings theorizes that the growth of unwanted cells, including cancerous cells, can be stopped if compounds are introduced into the cells that differ slightly from those that occur naturally; they use a compound closely related to thymine, and this false building block initiates a revolution that will not only lead to new drugs for treating gout, leukemia, malaria, and disorders of the human immune system but will pave the way for organ transplants.

New Orleans surgeon Alton Ochsner, 49, observes "a distinct parallelism between the incidence of cancer of the lung and the sale of cigarettes" in an address at Duke University (which has been endowed with a fortune derived from tobacco sales; see education, 1924). "The increase is due to the increased incidence of smoking and. . . smoking is a factor because of the chronic irritation it produces" (see 1933). World War II has increased incidence of cigarette smoking in America, where it began to surge after World War I, and news of Ochsner's remarks is suppressed (newspaper and radio advertising contracts with tobacco companies contain clauses forbidding any negative reports about cigarette smoking 1952).

The American Cancer Society is created by a renaming of the American Society for the Control of Cancer founded in 1913.

Hospital deliveries account for 79 percent of U.S. births, up from 37 percent in 1935. Cesarean deliveries have increased significantly.

Sexually transmitted disease rates climb sharply throughout the world as do premarital pregnancies and illegitimate births.

Physiologist William Henry Howell dies of a coronary occlusion at his native Baltimore February 6 at age 84; physician Sara Josephine Baker at New York February 22 at age 71; physiologist Walter B. Cannon at Franklin, N.H., October 1 at age 73.