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La moisissure et la bactérie: deconstructing the fable of the discovery of penicillin by Ernest Duchesne
journal contribution
posted on 2016-06-24, 10:19 authored by Gilbert ShamaErnest Duchesne (1874–1912) completed his thesis on microbial antagonism in 1897 in Lyon. His work lay unknown for fifty years, but on being brought to light led to his being credited with having discovered penicillin prior to Alexander Fleming. The claims surrounding Duchesne are examined here both from the strictly microbiological perspective, and also for what they reveal about how the process of discovery is frequently misconstrued. The combined weight of evidence presented here militates strongly against the possibility that the species of Penicillium that Duchesne worked with produced penicillin.
History
School
- Aeronautical, Automotive, Chemical and Materials Engineering
Department
- Chemical Engineering
Published in
EndeavourCitation
SHAMA, G., 2016. La moisissure et la bactérie: deconstructing the fable of the discovery of penicillin by Ernest Duchesne. Endeavour, 40 (3), pp. 188-200.Publisher
© ElsevierVersion
- AM (Accepted Manuscript)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Publication date
2016Notes
This paper was accepted for publication in the journal Endeavour and the definitive published version is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.endeavour.2016.07.005ISSN
1873-1929eISSN
0160-9327Publisher version
Language
- en