In 1897, a young French medical student named Ernest Duchesne submitted a ground-breaking doctoral thesis titled Contribution to the Study of Vital Competition Between Microorganisms: Antagonism Between Moulds and Microbes. In this work, Duchesne introduced a revolutionary idea that bacteria and moulds are locked in a constant struggle for survival, and this antagonism could be exploited for therapeutic use.
Although the therapeutic properties of fungi and plants in treating infections was known since ancient times, it was Duchesne who showed experimentally that certain moulds destroyed pathogenic bacteria such as Salmonella typhi (which causes typhoid fever) and Escherichia coli in laboratory cultures and when injected into guinea pigs. What Duchesne had discovered was the natural antibiotic penicillin—an achievement typically credited to Scottish physician Alexander Fleming. Duchesne’s work remained largely forgotten until it was rediscovered more than 50 years later, in 1949, four years after Fleming was awarded the prestigious Nobel Prize for his discovery.
Culture of penicillium mould. Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons
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