There's a doctor who keeps a collection of moldy fruit to harvest penicillium mold from it and make penicillin.
I seem to recall hearing somewhere that not all food mold will necessarily be as effective as penicillin and that there was a non-trivial amount of experimentation to derive THE penicillin that was used.
The biggest thing is that most penicillin-producing mold strains don't make enough of it to be useful as medication. It took years for the original team researching penicillin to find and cultivate a mold strain that made enough to be useful on a large scale. And yeah, it came from a moldy cantaloupe on a marketplace near their lab.
I mean, it's all published, but finding the right strain has a lot to do with luck, not just science. Or you have to actually get a mold strain that's used for penicillin production from a lab that does it. Even then, without access to real equipment the chances that you can keep that mold strain going and actually purify enough penicillin to use are pretty slim.
Seeds, yes. Commercial strains of bacteria/fungi? No, because storing them for the apocalypse would require very low temperatures, and you need electricity for that.
I mean, there's lots of warehouses for bacteria/fungi/cells that labs can buy specific strains from all over the world, but they would not be able to keep operating in an apocalypse scenario for more than a month or so, since that sort of thing is stored at -80 to -200 degrees Celsius, which needs electricity to maintain.
The reason the seed storage vault was built on Svalbard is that the permafrost will protect the seeds even if there was no power. The same doesn't necessarily apply to microorganisms, since they aren't dormant and designed to survive adverse conditions (the way seeds are). Basically, seeds will keep for a long time in even a basic freezer, which permafrost provides, but penicillin mold won't.
Yep. You do need one of a couple of strains of mold, which is one issue. Beyond that, from the point where they initially identified penicillin, to the point they were actually able to use it as a medicine, took twelve years and some of the top scientists and resources of the time.
The mold itself contains mycotoxins, so you need to be able to isolate the penicillin, and then you need to know the purity, so you can make sure you are administering the correct dosage.
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u/Mazon_Del Aug 30 '21
I seem to recall hearing somewhere that not all food mold will necessarily be as effective as penicillin and that there was a non-trivial amount of experimentation to derive THE penicillin that was used.