Medical Doctor Attempts to Make Penicillin | Outlander Makes
CLAIRE: Hey everyone, I’m Claire, we’re on Fraser’s Ridge and today we’re making …. penicillin!
PART ONE: WHAT IS PENICILLIN?
CLAIRE: Penicillin has been on my list for Outlander Makes for a very long time, almost since the beginning. It’s one of my favorite medicines. I just love that it can kill bacteria and save lives. It has that unique property of being made from mold, and I think it will be a cool learning opportunity for me because I just love penicillin.
Penicillin is effective against staphylococci and streptococci bacteria, some of the most common bacterial infections seen on the Ridge. It was the first modern antibiotic, which I suppose is relative. But penicillin itself comes from a secretion of molds in the genus Penicillium.
I can’t believe how much Outlander Makes makes me think about my university science classes.
It’s time for my favorite part: reading the ingredients. And wow, this is a short list: benzylpenicillin.
Time to go do some research. All of which is stored in my brain because it’s 1771 and penicillin won’t be officially discovered for 157 years.
Anyways, molds have been used to fight infections since ancient times. There’s evidence ancient peoples in Egypt, Greece and India used certain fungi and molds in their medicine, according to my Uncle Lamb’s research. But penicillin as I know it, in the future, was first discovered in a bread mold in 1928 by a Scot named Andrew Flemming, but then it wouldn’t be used in human medicine until 1942.
So, I think I’m going to start with bread. But the mold spores are just in the air, and there’s no reason another food couldn’t be a growing medium. So we’ll just have to see what works best. I’m excited. I think this is going to work.
PART TWO: HOW DO YOU MAKE PENICILLIN?
CLAIRE: I’ve got a whole bunch of extra bread, so I’m going to tear it up and leave it out and see what it grows. Marsali is also out collecting food scraps from the other settlers, things destined for the pig trough, that we’ll test as well.
I’m tempted to put my samples under glass cloches to keep mice and bugs and other pests out, but I’m concerned that they will prevent mold spores in the air from getting to the bread, so we’re going to try both.
MRS. BUG: She’s gone mad, she has. Up all night baking more bread than the Lord when he fed the multitudes with the loaves and fishes.
BRIANA: Woah. You’re not planning to eat all that, are you?
CLAIRE: No, I’m going to let it go moldy.
MRS. BUG: What a terrible waste.
BRIANA: Please tell me you’re being sarcastic.
CLAIRE: What, me? Never. I’m making penicillin.
BRIANA: Then Mrs. Bug is right, you have lost your mind. You can’t do that.
CLAIRE: Yes, I can. And not just with bread, we’re going to test other food scraps too. Then, we’ll find the right strain.
BRIANA: This is dangerous. What if it messes with some cosmic balance? Or breaks some rule of space and time? Isn’t this playing God?
CLAIRE: I change the future every time I save a life here. And now I’m going to do it even better. So, time, space, history be damned.
See, now all the bread is set up. Marsali will be back soon, and we’ll set up her scraps the same way, and then we wait.
CLAIRE: It’s a little dark in here because I wanted to keep the samples out of the sun. The bread and other samples have been left to mold for three days, and now we’re going to check and see how it went. I’m in that delusionally optimistic headspace where I think this might work on the first try.
I’m looking for a blue-green mold, maybe with a white outer ring. I’ve got my microscope and candles ready, so I can examine the mold more closely. What I don’t want is Aspergillus, another type of mold that grows under similar conditions but is very toxic and instead of curing infections would actually … kill my patients faster. So, if we see any fuzzier molds that are green, gray or black, that would be bad.
So, on a few of these samples I very clearly lost the battle against ants and some mice. The ones under the cloches fared better, but there’s not yet anything that looks like mold yet. This is going to take longer than I thought.
In the meantime, I’m going to work on the incubation medium that I’ll use to make even more penicillin once we grow the mold — which, we absolutely will. And for that I need Jamie.
CLAIRE: Could you go kill me something I can make into broth?
JAMIE: You canna slaughter a chicken yourself?
CLAIRE: I can, but could you just help out for the common good? And if you don’t want to kill a chicken you could go hunt something else, right?
JAMIE: Claire, what if you waste all this food and you don’t get your medicine?
CLAIRE: I want you to know I can accept zero criticism right now.
JAMIE: Then I’ll be back with some meat for your broth.
CLAIRE: It’s day three! Well, it’s been a week but it’s day three of work. No, there’s no curse. Stop trying to make a day three curse happen.
Jamie shot a goose, and Bree plucked it for me, and Mrs. Bug made it into this broth. I’ve got to check out our bread and food samples and see if any Penicillium molds have grown. And … there are a lot of molds here! Turns out more than one mold can grow on bread. I’m looking for the classic blue-green color, and there is more than just blue-green here. This pie crust did a little better — see the white outer ring, and there’s no black, like on this bread sample. This is promising.
If I remember my textbooks correctly, Penicillium will look like a stalk of wheat with a branched end under the microscope. If the end is more like a fuzzy ball, it’s the killer Aspergillus mold that I talked about earlier. I’m going to make slides and see if I can positively identify any of these as penicillin.
CLAIRE: OK, I’m down to the last two slides, and so far it’s a big fat nothing.
ROGER: What is going well right now?
CLAIRE: Nothing. This whole thing is a disaster. If these don’t have the right mold, I’ve wasted this whole week and all this food and will have to start over.
CLAIRE: Say a prayer, Roger. And…. got them. I was right about the pie crust — that’s definitely a Penicillium colony growing. I love it when I’m good at stuff.
ROGER: We all knew you could do it.
CLAIRE: Bree thinks I’m breaking the time-space continuum, but there it is! That’s penicillin!
So, my next step is to prepare the incubation mediums. I’ve got the broth Mrs. Bug kindly prepared, and I’m going to strain it and then boil it. I also need to sterilize the bowls, so I’m boiling some water for that. And then I have these muslin cloths that I’ve also boiled and air dried as best as I could, which will keep things like insects, bugs, mice and other critters out. It’s nearly impossible to achieve true sterility in these conditions, but it’s important to try.
And then I’m going to use these confirmed Penicillium samples and use a sterilized knife to put them into the broth to incubate. The thing about penicillin is that the mold itself isn’t antibiotic, but the mold’s secretions, so that’s what I’m trying to produce and capture.
So, I’ll leave this to do its thing. We’ll check back in a few more days.
CLAIRE: WHAT DO YOU MEAN ONE OF THE CHILDREN GOT IN HERE AND KNOCKED OVER ONE OF THE BOWLS?
CLAIRE: ADSO! GET AWAY FROM THERE! NO, STOP DRINKING IT!
JAMIE: Are you done with your experiment, Sassenach?
CLAIRE: Noooo. I can’t believe that you can’t sense right now that I am not in a good place.
CLAIRE: I guess it’s time to check the remaining bowls and see how incubation went. Like with the bread and food samples, I’m looking for Penicillium’s distinctive blue-green coloring with a white ring around the outside. So, the first bowl: nope, that’s not it. See those hairy, green clumps that look like submerged sea beasts? It could be another mold, bacterium, or maybe a colonial alga, but it’s not at all what I’m looking for.
But this second one, yes, this looks promising. See the colony in there? Looks like Penicillium to me. And, it’s worked in two more of these bowls. Three out of six isn’t a terrible average, even if two of my bowls got canned.
I’m going to have to check under the microscope again to be sure, but I’m, like 98 percent sure that’s it. I’ll strain the broth once more, to get the solid mold parts out. It’s the mold’s secretions you want, not the mold itself.
JAMIE: So what you’ve got there is broth that the mold has pissed in, is that right?
CLAIRE: Well, if you insist on putting it that way, yes. This was so much work, and it’s so unsure. This is a huge advancement in medicine for this time. It was way easier to mix up gentian ointment, or to set up the beehives, but maybe it was less satisfying. Is it better to not work that hard and not be that satisfied or to work really hard and be exhausted and somewhat more satisfied? I don’t know. Basically, there’s no way to win.
PART THREE: HOW TO MAKE PENICILLIN
CLAIRE: Here’s how you make penicillin.
Tear up pie crust and other food scraps, including bread, and leave them out to mold under glass cloches for five to seven days, keeping the cultures out of direct sunlight and away from pests. When the food starts to mold, identify Penicillium by its coloring and then under a microscope, looking for the mold’s distinctive branching pattern. Use a sterilized knife to distribute samples of your Penicillium into sterilized bowls of strained and boiled broth that has been cooled. Cover with sterilized muslin cloths and leave to incubate for several days. To use, check that broth has grown more Penicillium mold, by both the mold’s coloring and by shape under magnification. Strain the mold out of the broth, and use it to treat infection.
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