Bagels, Lox and Penicillin

WW II Poster
Public Domain

Leave bagels and lox hanging around long enough, and penicillin might join that party.  Just what did it take to transform a moldy snack into a life-saving drug?

It took the partnering of Sir Ernst Boris Chain, a Nazi survivor, who was instrumental in discovering "penicillin's therapeutic action and its chemical composition."  He, Howard Florey and Sir Alexander Fleming all received the 1945 Nobel Prize for their history-making contributions.  Chain, a devoted Jew, was especially proud of penicillin's ability to save World War II soldiers who had fought so valiantly against the Nazi regime.

"The Little Rabbi" (aka Jonas Salk) felt that, given their longstanding tragic history, "Jews knew better than anyone else about the meaning of pain."  He was therefore highly motivated to ease humanity's suffering in some way.  Salk's development of the polio vaccine ended up reversing a trend that "had killed or disabled at least a million Americans, including a president of the United States."  He, too, became an international hero.

Those who prefer prevention to cure might rely upon Vitamin C to offset the need for penicillin-type measures.  History often neglects to include the Jewish piece of this puzzle.  Although Linus Pauling won the Nobel Prize for his work on the healing effects of Vitamin C, it was Tadeus Reichstein, a Jewish endocrinologist, who first synthesized ascorbic acid in 1933.

If all this isn't impressive enough, Selman Abraham Waksman went on to discover "the wonder drug" that superseded even penicillin.  He coined a new term for it ("antibiotic," sound familiar?) because it so effectively destroyed living microorganisms.  The drug, streptomycin, is estimated to have "saved many more lives since its discovery than were lost in all of the Napoleonic Wars."  Could be why this Jewish doctor won a Nobel Price, an Order of Merit of The Rising Sun, plus induction into the French Legion of Honor...

Resources

The abovementioned information was generally obtained from The Complete Idiot's Guide to Jewish History and Culture, a book by Rabbi Benjamin Blech.  Rabbi Blech, an internationally-acclaimed writer and speaker on Jewish topics, is one of the first rabbis in history to have conferred a blessing upon a pope (John Paul II at the Vatican in 2005).