Hae ye said your prayers yet?

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  • 19/12/2022

    Hugh Pennington | Deadly GAS · LRB 13 December 2022

    Another terrific bit of writing by Hugh Pennington in the LRB. It is saturated with insights into a golden age of medical science.

    Streptococcus pyogenes is also known as Lancefield Group A [GAS]. In the 1920s and 1930s, at the Rockefeller Institute in New York, Rebecca Lancefield discovered that streptococci could be grouped at species level by a surface polysaccharide, A, and that A strains could be subdivided by another surface antigen, the M protein.

    Ronald Hare, a bacteriologist at Queen Charlotte’s Hospital in London, worked on GAS in the 1930s, a time when they regularly killed women who had just given birth and developed puerperal fever. He collaborated with Lancefield to prove that GAS was the killer. On 16 January 1936 he pricked himself with a sliver of glass contaminated with a GAS. After a day or two his survival was in doubt.

    His boss, Leonard Colebrook, had started to evaluate Prontosil, a red dye made by I.G. Farben that prevented the death of mice infected with GAS. He gave it to Hare by IV infusion and by mouth. It turned him bright pink. He was visited in hospital by Alexander Fleming, a former colleague. Fleming said to Hare’s wife: ‘Hae ye said your prayers?’ But Hare made a full recovery.

    Prontosil also saved women with puerperal fever. The effective component of the molecule wasn’t the dye, but another part of its structure, a sulphonamide. It made Hare redundant. The disease that he had been hired to study, funded by an annual grant from the Medical Research Council, was now on the way out. He moved to Canada where he pioneered influenza vaccines and set up a penicillin factory that produced its first vials on 20 May 1944. [emphasis added]

    He returned to London after the war and in the early 1960s gave me a job at St Thomas’s Hospital Medical School. I wasn’t allowed to work on GAS. There wasn’t much left to discover about it in the lab using the techniques of the day, and penicillin was curative.

    [emphasis added]