Read Happy Accidents: Serendipity in Major Medical Breakthroughs in the Twentieth Century for Free Online Page B

separate compounds. Their system of methodical trial-and-error yielded no good results until it was blessed by serendipity.
    The true brew turned out to be a compound in a dusty bottle prepared seven years previously without any antimicrobial action in mind. It would shortly evolve into a form known as sulfapyridine. The historian of science John Lesch uncovered the event:
One day in October 1937, someone in the laboratory… noticed an old bottle sitting on the shelf. It turned out to be a sample of the base aminopyridine, prepared by a chemist named Eric Baines back in 1930 for another chemist who had since left the company. The sample… had stood on the shelf collecting dust ever since. Looking back two and a half decades later, company chemists… agreed that it would have been very unlikely that this compound would have been prepared for use in the sulfanilamide derivatives program. But since it was there, “at the front of the third shelf on the left hand side of the cupboard,” as another chemist, L.E. Hart, recalled, it was used. “Well, you know what would happen very much in those days,” Baines remarked to company colleagues in 1961, “you would set out to try and make something, and you would find something on the shelf, and you would try it.” 11
    Sulfapyridine not only proved more potent than sulfanilamide but also had a wider spectrum of antibacterial activity. It was effective against pneumococci, meningococci, gonococci, and other organisms.It reduced the mortality rate among patients with the dreaded lobar pneumonia from 1 in 4 to only 1 in 25.
    By the late 1930s and early 1940s the initiative for research pursuits passed to the British and the Americans. 12 May and Baker began marketing sulfapyridine in 1938. It and the other new sulfa drugs were prescribed in huge quantities. By 1941 some 1,700 tons of them were given to 10 million Americans. Sulfadiazine, prepared by the American Cyanamid Company in 1940, was used extensively during World War II. The mortality rate among American soldiers in epidemics of meningitis was cut from 39 percent to 3.8 percent. (However, the course of gas gangrene, a bacterial infection following injury to muscles, characterized by bubbles of gas in the tissues, could not be successfully altered.) Every American soldier carried a packet of sulfa powder in his first-aid kit during World War II.
    In late 1943 a singular incident involving Winston Churchill created a major impact on the popular imagination. The sixty-nine-year-old Churchill, in Tunisia for the planning of the invasion of Italy, developed life-threatening pneumonia. A course of sulfapyridine saved him, and, in typical Churchillian prose, he proclaimed that “the intruders were repulsed.” 13 The “miracle drug” became a household term. The medical profession, impressed by reports of highly favorable clinical results, was now awakened to the new field of bacterial chemotherapy. A profusion of different “sulfa drugs,” all white crystalline powders, followed in quick succession.
    The sulfa drugs were a breakthrough in the treatment of a host of deadly infections, such as pneumonia, meningitis, childbed fever, wound infections, erysipelas, mastoiditis, bacillary dysentery, gonorrhea, and most urinary infections. 14 For the first time, the majority of these patients survived and recovered without lasting damage. These drugs would later be superseded by antibiotics, but the hope and faith in medical science engendered by Gerhard Domagk's discovery reverberate to this day.
The FDA Is Born
In 1937 shortly after young FDR Jr. recovered from his serious infection, a small Tennessee firm named Massengill and Company, which made pharmaceuticals for animals, began marketing a sulfa drug for people. To make it more easily administered to children in a sweet liquid form, they dissolved the drug in diethyl glycol, a commercial solvent used to make antifreeze, and sold it widely throughout the South as “Elixir of