Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

Gee-Oh1 t1_je76ror wrote

I am a mycologist and worked several years in a environmental testing company, phase I and II environmental assessment and indoor air quality. It is amazing easy to collect fungal spores. Our field technicians would sample surfaces with nothing but cotton swabs individually held in sterile sealable tubes. All I had to do is wipe the cotton swabs onto agar plates...wait 5 to 7 days, the usual time for the imperfect fungus to begin sporilating, so I could identify them.

Oxytetracycline was discovered in soil samples near Pfizer's labs in 1950. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxytetracycline And it is produced by the fungus Streptomyces rimosus. I have seen this fungus before and its conidia are unremarkable, they are small hyloid ovoids in a string that sequentially bud from the end of the hypha.

Her description of the conidia as "terrible mice" doesn't make sense. Rather it sounds like another fairly common fungus I've seen before that is not a source of any antibiotic.

49

Longjumping_Owl5740 t1_je7dknw wrote

You're probably right, the article used as a source for that claim on Wikipedia even goes on to say that claim makes no sense.

>Johnson’s claims about the origins of Terramycin were inaccurate. Ehrlich’s employer didn’t develop Terramycin; a different company, Pfizer, applied for the patent in 1949, after Terramycin was isolated from a soil sample from Terre Haute, Indiana. Ehrlich wasn’t involved. Additionally, companies were racing to find new antibiotics; if Terramycin had in fact been discovered in 1944, there was no reason a company would wait five years to patent it.

15