Commercial Size Plant for Penicillin and Margaret Hutchinson Rousseau - My Understanding in 30 Minutes.

This blog post was inspired by a talk I got to listen to at the Chemistry at Work event, funded by the Royal Institution of Chemistry, in Essex earlier today.

Penicillin was the first ever widely used antibiotic which was discovered by Alexander Fleming, more or less by accident, in 1928. Well I say by accident but he did have to consciously isolate the penicillin first, before he actually discovered it. So, the isolation of penicillin from mould is actually difficult from what I understood at the talk today. And so, the process of actually getting penicillin to be used treat people was originally only done on a small scale that would produce very small amounts, meaning the process had to be repeated many times to get a substantial amount.

Yet in 1944, entered Margaret Hutchinson Rousseau, the first female to receive a PhD in Chemical Engineering (quite amazing actually). She was the chemical engineer who actually came up with a way to scale up the penicillin process to a commercial size plant. She done this by developing a process that involved deep-tank fermentation, which is what allowed this scale up; deep-tank fermenters are used in processes still to this say. It's actually interesting that at secondary school I never got told about the history and specific use of a deep-tank fermenter, yet I definitely remember learning about the different parts it in Biology

Really, the point of this post was to show how, similar to processes like the Haber-Bosch process, there are always chemical engineers, somewhere, scaling up processes that someone has only managed to do on a small scale. More so, it is only today I even got to know of Rousseau and her amazing work. Also, an interesting point to add on the the topic of antibiotics is that apparently antibiotic resistance is a real problem in the world and is the cause of many deaths. Although i definitely knew this problem existed, it is only today I was made aware of how serious it is, and that actually, as a future chemical engineer I could be working on scaling up new processes that involve antibiotics that have no resistance to them yet.  


Sources used:

[1]  http://ichemeblog.org/2015/05/18/ten-chemical-engineers-that-shaped-our-world-day-356/comment-page-2/
[2] http://www.abpischools.org.uk/page/modules/infectiousdiseases_timeline/timeline6.cfm?coSiteNavigation_allTopic=1