On September 4, 1954, the first Bulgarian penicillin was produced, and on September 5, the Antibiotic Plant in Razgrad was officially opened.
This is recalled on "On this date".
The Antibiotic Plant in Razgrad glorifies Bulgaria throughout the world. The beginning was set with a decree of the Council of Ministers of September 28, 1951, which authorized the Ministry of Public Health and Social Welfare to begin the study and design of a penicillin plant. According to the Decree of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the task was set to request from the government of the then USSR Soviet specialists to design the plant, to train personnel and to provide special machinery and equipment. Among the cities indicated for study was Razgrad.
In the summer of 1952, architect Seleznyov arrived in Razgrad with the task of finding the right terrain. He chose a place next to the Hisarlak mound, which turned out to be the most suitable - high terrain, excluding flooding in the event of a flood. And to this day, legends continue that there is a golden Roman chariot under the factory.
On September 4, 1954, Tatyana Leontievna and engineer Petar Stoyanov extracted the first crystals of Bulgarian penicillin, which was marked by the wail of the factory siren, which made all the residents of Razgrad share in the joyful moment.
In the following decades, the medicines produced in Razgrad exceeded 200 types. Through the antibiotic factory, Bulgaria was the second country in the world to start producing the highly effective antibiotics tubocin and tylosin. If at first penicillin met exclusively the needs of Bulgarian healthcare for this antibiotic, then a large part of the production went for export - to Russia and other countries of the former Soviet Union, Western Europe, Asia, Africa, America and even Australia. The first export was made in 1955 - penicillin to China.
Penicillin is the world's first antibiotic, discovered by the Scottish scientist Alexander Fleming in 1928. The development of penicillin for use as a medicine is attributed to the Nobel Prize laureates in Medicine Howard Florey and Ernst Chain.
However, several other researchers described the bacteriostatic effect of Penicillium earlier than Fleming. In all likelihood, the first such publication was made in 1875 by John Tyndall at the Royal Society in London. French physician Ernest Duchesne documented the lethal effects of certain types of mold on bacteria in an 1894 publication that was not accepted by the Pasteur Institute because of his youth.
Fleming attributed the discovery of penicillin to the morning of Friday, September 28, 1928.
While working in his basement laboratory at St. Mary's Hospital in London (now part of Imperial College), Fleming noticed a "halo" of no bacterial growth around a blue-green mold contaminating a plate of staphylococcal bacterial culture. He concluded that the mold was releasing a substance that inhibited bacterial growth and dissolved the bacterial cells.