Abstract
IN an article on penicillin treatment in Nature (677, Nov. 25, 1944) reference was made to the work of Lieut.-Colonel J. W. Bigger (Lancet, 497, Oct. 14, 1944), who concluded that penicillin actually kills Staphylococcus pyogenes. He suggested that it kills them at the time of division and has no effect upon individual cocci which are not dividing. These, therefore, persist in broth cultures, which penicillin frequently fails to sterilize, and are the explanation of that failure. Bigger proposed to give penicillin intermittently, in the hope that these 'persisters' would begin dividing in the intervals of the penicillin doses and so would be killed by the next dose. Bigger refers to the work of C. D. Gardner (Nature, 146, 837; 1940), who found that, in weak concentrations of penicillin, cocci swelled to three times their normal size without division, arid bacilli showed similar changes.
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LAPAGE, G. Mode of Action of Penicillin. Nature 155, 403–404 (1945). https://doi.org/10.1038/155403a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/155403a0