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La moisissure et la bactérie: deconstructing the fable of the discovery of penicillin by Ernest Duchesne

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journal contribution
posted on 2016-06-24, 10:19 authored by Gilbert Shama
Ernest 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

Endeavour

Citation

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

© Elsevier

Version

  • 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

2016

Notes

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.2016.07.005

ISSN

1873-1929

eISSN

0160-9327

Language

  • en

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