“What’s in a name?”
Antidepressant use is on the rise in the U.S.– and with it, the proliferation of new mood-management drug names. At the same time, the Tech Right’s fascination with The Lord of the Rings, has occasioned a flood of company and product names drawn from that fantasy series. It can be very confusing, as a new game from the folks at Vercel demonstrates. Can you tell if a name is an antidressant drug or a Tolkien character?
* Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet (Act II, Scene II)
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As we navigate nomenclature, we might recall that it was on this date in 1941 that first injection of penicillin into a patient was administered by physician Charles Fletcher at Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford, England.
In 1928, Alexander Fleming had discovered the anitbacterial properties of the Penicillium mold. But he had little luck convincing his medical colleagues of its value: penicillin was so difficult to isolate that its development as a drug seemed impossible. After Fletcher’s experiment and others– all of which showed promise, but “failed” when the doctors ran out of penicillin– Fleming used the hospital’s entire supply of penicillin to cure a patient of an infection of the nervous system (streptococcal meningitis) which would otherwise have been fatal. Having established medical efficacy, the doctors were able to convince labs in the U.K and the U.S. to pursue large-scale fermentation of the mold and refinments in its medical form. By June 1942, just enough US penicillin was available to treat ten patients. But with the U.S. entry into World War II, the War Production Board undertook to make penicillin available to fighting forces across the conflict. By June, 1945, over 646 billion units per year were being produced.
