Dome Six

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Two particular scientific developments that come to bear on this series: antibiotic resistance and 3D bioprinting. If you’re already familiar with these, keep trucking. If not, I thought you might appreciate a quick primer in layman’s terms.

Penicillin wasn’t technically the first antibiotic. Advanced civilizations have used plants or molds with antibiotic properties for thousands of years, and it was a German doctor named Paul Ehrlich who discovered arsphenamine, the first modern antibiotic, as a treatment for syphilis. He was awarded the Nobel prize in 1908, and it’s interesting to note that he coined the phrase “chemotherapy” in reference to this treatment.

Of course, Alexander Fleming gets most of the credit. He (quite accidentally) discovered penicillin in 1928, but it wasn’t actually introduced for widespread use until 1942. We take antibiotics for granted now, but chances are, someone in your family will remember a time before they were a thing. Until then, bacteria were the No. 1 cause of death worldwide.

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