Why Was Penicillin Important

Penicillin would be used to treat infections that wounded and ill soldiers suffered during World War II. This proved that penicillin had a vital importance to save lives. Penicillin prevented thousands of wartime deaths. After the attack on Pearl Harbor by Japan on December 7, 1941, it became clear that a mass amount of penicillin needed to be produced in order to win the war. The U.S. was able to produce 2.3 million portions of penicillin in order to prepare for the D-Day invasion of Normandy. Penicillin soon was known as the “miracle drug” of the war, curing diseases and saving the lives of millions. The discovery of penicillin changed the lives of everyone on the globe, but it also changed the course of medicine. With the development of penicillin, diseases that were once seen as fatal, such as bacterial meningitis and pneumococcal pneumonia, finally had an easy, treatable, solution. In the 1930s pneumococcal pneumonia would be treated with antisera and sulfonamides. These were a
The Nuremberg Code was established after the Nuremberg Trials, and it is a set of research ethics principles for human experimentation. These principles explain what should and should not be acceptable in terms of human experimentation. This is one of the only positive outcomes of the Nazi medical program. A few criteria for ethical experimentation are that, the subject must give full consent in participating in the experiment, there has to be a solid basis for the experiment, and the experiment must be conducted to avoid all unnecessary physical and mental suffering. These examples highlight three of the points in the code, but all of the others are establishing the same thing, a humane and ethical experiment. After the Nuremberg Code was established, we have yet to hear of brutal experiments as extreme as the