PLAYING CHICKEN WITH HUMAN LIVES (Part 3)
For a nanosecond, human medical need took priority over antibiotic profits
by Richard Conniff
In December, 1948, Thomas Jukes, then a biochemist at Lederle Laboratories, had just discovered the extraordinary power of the company’s new antibiotic aureomycin to promote growth of chickens. He expected the company to recognize that adding the antibiotic to livestock feed had the potential to transform the entire business of meat production. Instead, Lederle told him that his lab “could have no more of the product because it was needed for the extraction of the antibiotic for use in human medicine.” It was just about the last time in the history of antibiotics that human medical needs would take priority over livestock and drug company profits.
Jukes and his staff soon turned to the waste products from the fermentation process used to manufacture aureomycin. Lederle was brewing the soil fungus Streptomyces auriofaciens in large vats, and then using acetone to extract the antibiotic from the fermentation liquid. Jukes referred to the waste product as “acetone cake,” which needed to be dried out and pulverized for the use he had in mind. Enough residue of the microbe remained afterward, it turned out, to yield the same growth-promoting effect when fed to chicks.
Lederle sent out samples for testing at universities and agricultural experimental stations. A University of Florida researcher got “the most spectacular results,” a reported tripling of the growth rate in young pigs. Others reported gains were far smaller, but still significant enough for Lederle to see the light.
Within a year after the original discovery by Jukes, the company put aureomycin on the market as animal feed additive, not waiting to complete toxicity testing or other routine assays. The stuff was soon selling by the tanker car. Demand was intense, particularly in the Midwestern states, where the aureomycin content also cured an epidemic of bloody diarrhea in pigs. A U.S. Senator from Nebraska was soon complaining that his state wasn't getting its fair share of this miraculous product. A Minnesota pharmacist bought it in bulk, repackaged it, and sold it at such a high markup that he supposedly retired to Florida on the profits.
Misleadingly, Lederle marketed the product at first as a source of vitamin B12,, Jukes wrote, and was thus “able to avoid any registration problems as to its antibiotic content.” When the FDA finally found out a year later that American livestock were being fed large quantities of antibiotics, Jukes wrote, an official there merely asked "what level of aureomycin should be authorized for use as an animal feed supplement," and the company told him.
The New York Times broke the news on its front page on April 10, 1950, under the headline, “’Wonder Drug’ Aureomycin Found to Spur Growth 50%” Science writer William L. Laurence quoted a Lederle report saying that this “spectacular” discovery held “enormous long-range significance for the survival of the human race in a world of dwindling resources and expanding populations.” The article concluded, “No undesirable side effects have been observed, it is said.”
Other studies in that era suggested that adding antibiotics to animal feed could produce a gain in the 4-12 percent range, not 50 percent. But that still represented a significant advantage in the business of getting more meat to market less expensively. By eliminating certain chronic diseases, the daily antibiotic regimen also made it possible to raise animals in large concentrated animal feeding operations. These CAFOs would become the central feature of modern industrial agriculture.
The innovation by Jukes and his colleagues soon spread worldwide, and the era of antibiotics devoted primarily to meat production, rather than to human health, had begun.
(to be continued tomorrow)