How To Make Penicillin At Home
Penicillin was the first antibiotic discovered (1933) - the word means against (anti) life (bio). The discovery of penicillin and its medicinal uses was arguably the most important medical discovery of the 20th century. The production of penicillin is a process that has changed dramatically since its beginnings. Opposed to what most people think, penicillin is used not only for treating colds but also serious diseases like Typhoid Fever, Syphilis, Pneumonia, Meningitis, Anthrax, Tetanus Tuberculosis, Chlamydia, Abscesses, Leptospirosis, Lyme disease.
But the most important thing is that it treats infections. Simple cuts can begin to show infection very fast when SHTF. And without an antibiotic, you can develop septicemia (blood infection) or gangrene which are deadly without very powerful antibiotics or surgery. Without antibiotics many people had died because of simple wounds including kings such as Louis XIV, Napoleon III or Gustav III of Sweden. How to Make Penicillin at Home,
In order to make penicillin at home you first need to grow the Penicillin fungus. The most important thing to remember is to always use sterile techniques or you will likely wind up with growing something else! Expose a slice of bread to the air, in a dark place and normal-high humidity, at 70 deg. F until a bluish-green mold develops. This process may last up to 7-14 days.
The mold will start out gray, but as it develops will turn bright blue-green. Once it gets started, cut the bread up into pieces and put it in a sterilized flask. Incubate it in the flask for about a week in the same conditions. You can also make penicillin the same way out of the peel of citrus fruits, cantaloupe or salami.
Then add enough cold tap water to make one liter. Pour the solution into sterilized milk bottles. Use only enough so that when the bottle is placed in its side, the media does not reach the plug. Add approximately one tablespoon of the spores you’ve grown. Incubate the bottles at 70 degrees Fahrenheit for 7 days.
If the culture produced penicillin, you may see it now in the liquid portion of the solution following this incubation period. Filter the media (using a coffee filter or a thick canvas), plug the bottles and refrigerate immediately. That’s how you make penicillin. After a few hours use again the hydrochloric acid to adjust the solution to 2.2 Ph.
Mix it with cold Ethyl Acetate in a Separatory Funnel and shake well. Drain the ethyl acetate, from the bottom, into a beaker which has been placed in an ice bath and repeat the process. Add 1% potassium acetate and mix. Now wait until the ethyl acetate will evaporate off. This may take a while. When it finally dries, the remaining powder contains Penicillin. There are other ways to make penicillin. In fact, nowadays, pharmaceutical companies make penicillin using other, more complicated, methods.
But this was the best solution to make penicillin when it first started. The resulting penicillin made this way, is actively excreted, and about 80% of a penicillin dose is cleared from the body within three to four hours of administration. In order to have a long lasting effect, scientist combined it with probenecid.
When probenecid and penicillin are administered together, probenecid competitively inhibits the excretion of penicillin, increasing penicillin’s concentration and prolonging its activity. Although you did probably make mold growing on the bread, it is possible you also got other molds. Even with the right kind of fungi growing, filtering out everything but the penicillin is difficult.
