120 Fun Facts About Antibiotics

Antibiotics work against bacteria but are useless against which of these?

Viruses. That is why antibiotics do nothing for a cold or flu, and prescribing them for such infections anyway is one of the commonest ways the drugs are misused.

What does the word 'antibiotic' literally mean, from its Greek roots?

'Opposing life'. It joins the Greek anti, against, to bios, life, and it began as an adjective for anything that destroyed microbes; only in the 1940s did it become the noun for the drugs.

Who discovered penicillin after noticing mould on a culture plate at a London hospital?

Alexander Fleming. His assistants could never purify the unstable 'mould juice', so his 1929 paper made only a passing mention of using it as a medicine, and few people noticed it.

At which London hospital was penicillin discovered?

St Mary's, Paddington. The cramped laboratory survives as a museum, but the hospital never turned the find into a medicine; that took a team at Oxford more than a decade later.

Which bacterium was growing on the famous contaminated culture plate that led to penicillin?

Staphylococcus aureus. Around the stray mould the colonies had vanished, leaving a clear ring, which showed that the mould was giving off something that stopped the bacteria growing.

Penicillium, the mould behind penicillin, is named after the Latin for what?

Paintbrush. The Latin word is penicillus, and under the microscope the mould's spore-bearing tips fan out like the bristles of a tiny brush.

Penicillin's discoverer found it on returning from what?

Holiday. He had left culture plates on his laboratory bench, and on 3 September 1928 he came back to find one of them spoiled by a stray mould.

Salvarsan, known in Paul Ehrlich's laboratory as compound 606, was the first effective drug against which disease?

Syphilis. Demand for it was worldwide and immediate, and it remained the standard cure until penicillin took its place in the 1940s.

Salvarsan, the first synthetic antibacterial drug, was a compound of which element?

Arsenic. Ehrlich's idea was to take a poison and reshape it chemically until it killed the microbe but spared the patient; the arsenic drug he started from had been dangerously toxic.

Gerhard Domagk developed Prontosil, the first sulfonamide, at the laboratories of which German company?

Bayer. Domagk's own young daughter was among the first people Prontosil saved, yet when the discovery won him a Nobel Prize the Nazi government forced him to turn it down.

What kept the sulfa drug sulfanilamide from being patented?

It had long been used in the dye industry, so the compound was already off-patent and cheap to make. Any firm could sell it, and many companies were soon mass-producing sulfa drugs.

Selman Waksman, who first called these drugs 'antibiotics', won a Nobel Prize for which one?

Streptomycin was isolated in 1943 by Albert Schatz, a graduate student in Waksman's laboratory, yet the 1952 Nobel Prize went to Waksman alone.

The 1945 Nobel Prize for penicillin was shared by its discoverer and which two Oxford scientists?

Howard Florey and Ernst Chain proved the drug on eight infected mice in 1940: the four given penicillin lived, and the four left untreated were dead by the next morning.

Which Oxford crystallographer confirmed the structure of penicillin by X-ray in the 1940s?

Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin set aside her study of insulin to take on the urgent wartime job. She then went back to insulin, a far bigger molecule, and finally solved it in 1969.

Why did Albert Alexander, the first patient Oxford's team tried to cure with penicillin, die after rallying?

The drug ran out: the laboratory could not make it fast enough to finish his course, and he relapsed and died weeks later. Later patients, treated for long enough, recovered.

The high-yield wartime penicillin mould was found on a mouldy what in a Peoria market?

Cantaloupe: after a worldwide hunt for a more productive mould, the best strain turned up at a market in the laboratory's own town, and its descendants went into mass production.

Which Midwestern farm by-product did the Peoria laboratory add to its vats to boost penicillin yields?

Corn steep liquor, the liquid left over from milling cornstarch, let Peoria grow far more penicillin than Oxford ever had, and the method was passed on to the drug companies.

American factories raced to have penicillin ready in quantity for which Allied landings?

The Normandy landings of June 1944 were the target. Two years earlier America had made enough for only about ten patients; deep-tank fermentation then produced enough for the invasion force.

Antibiotics are often matched to 'Gram-positive' or 'Gram-negative' bacteria, labels that come from what?

A staining test: the Danish bacteriologist Hans Christian Gram devised it while studying pneumonia, and found that some bacteria held his violet dye while others washed clean.

Why did the leader of Oxford's penicillin team never patent the drug?

He was advised it would be unethical to profit from a life-saving drug, and Americans patented the production methods instead. When his team later found cephalosporin, he pressed to patent it at once.

Doctors in the early penicillin era routinely recovered the drug for reuse from what?

Patients' urine: the kidneys clear most of a dose within hours, almost completely unchanged, so hospitals collected it and extracted the penicillin to inject again.

Which gout drug was given with penicillin to make each dose last longer?

Probenecid keeps penicillin in the bloodstream for longer. Athletes later used the same effect to hide steroids from drug testers, and sport added it to the banned list for 1988.

Penicillin kills bacteria by blocking the final step in building which structure?

The cell wall: with its cross-links left unfinished the wall weakens, water floods into the bacterium and it bursts.

Which structural feature of penicillin binds to bacterial enzymes and gives its drug family its name?

The β-lactam ring mimics the building block these enzymes normally stitch together, so they seize the drug instead and are put out of action.

Bacteria often pass antibiotic-resistance genes to one another on small rings of DNA called what?

Plasmids can be copied from one bacterium into another, even one of a different species, so a single resistance gene can jump between unrelated germs in the same hospital.

Why is clavulanic acid added to some penicillin-type antibiotics?

It disables the bacteria's defensive enzyme by acting as a decoy: the enzyme locks onto clavulanic acid, itself a natural product of another microbe, and leaves the real antibiotic alone.

Which penicillin, launched in 1961, was the first with a broad spectrum that reached Gram-negative bacteria?

Ampicillin differs from the original penicillin by a single amino group, which helps it slip through the pores in the outer membrane of Gram-negative bacteria.

The 'M' in the superbug MRSA stands for resistance to which antibiotic?

Methicillin reached hospitals around 1960 and resistant staph was spotted within a year. A 2017 genetic study traced those strains back to the 1940s, probably bred by penicillin itself.

Penicillin's core molecule, 6-APA, was isolated in the 1950s by scientists at which British company?

Beecham chemists could now bolt new side chains onto the bare penicillin core, and every semi-synthetic penicillin since has been built on that molecule.

Stomach ulcers became curable with antibiotics after Barry Marshall swallowed a culture of which bacterium?

Helicobacter pylori made him ill within days, backing his case that an infection, not stress, lay behind ulcers. He and Robin Warren shared the 2005 Nobel Prize for the discovery.

A true penicillin allergy usually does what within ten years?

Fades away: about one American in ten is listed as allergic to penicillin, but true allergy is uncommon, and most real ones wane within a decade.

Penicillin V was an advance on the original penicillin G because it survives what?

Stomach acid breaks down penicillin G, which is why it has to be injected. Penicillin V passes through intact, so it became the penicillin people could swallow at home as a tablet or liquid.

Which antibiotic, known for lodging in bones and teeth, turns up in ancient Nubian skeletons, probably from their beer?

Tetracycline locks into growing bone and glows yellow-green under ultraviolet light, which is how it was spotted. Sceptics blamed contamination after burial until chemists extracted the drug itself in 2010.

After the 2001 anthrax letter attacks, the US government stockpiled millions of tablets of which antibiotic?

Ciprofloxacin, sold as Cipro, was the drug health officials first recommended against anthrax. Washington threatened to buy generic copies until the maker cut its price for the national stockpile.

Why are some long-lasting infections treated with several antibiotics at once rather than one?

To stop resistant strains emerging: among billions of bacteria a few will shrug off any one drug, but almost none can survive several at once, so some courses combine four drugs for months.

A raspberry-flavoured sulfa syrup killed more than 100 Americans in 1937, prompting a law that new drugs must be what?

Proven safe before sale: the syrup's solvent was a poison nobody had tested, which was legal at the time. Its makers could be charged only with mislabelling, since an 'elixir' was meant to contain alcohol.

By the 2020s, which sexually transmitted infection had become resistant to almost every antibiotic used against it?

Gonorrhoea has beaten penicillin and each later drug in turn. Strains that also shrug off ceftriaxone, the treatment now recommended, are known as super gonorrhoea.

The WHO's 2018 report on antibiotic use in 65 countries found which drug the most consumed in most of them?

Amoxicillin became the everyday choice because the gut absorbs it better than older oral penicillins, so more of each dose reaches the blood.

Drug-resistant infections directly killed about 1.27 million people in 2019, more than which disease?

HIV/AIDS killed fewer, as did malaria. The 1.27 million are people who would have lived had the same infections still responded to standard drugs; resistance played some part in almost five million deaths.

In 2006 the European Union banned adding antibiotics to animal feed for what purpose?

To speed up growth: researchers had found in the 1940s that small daily doses fattened healthy animals faster. The EU ended the practice over fears it bred resistant bacteria that could pass to people.

Some patients are given a dose of antibiotics before dental surgery to protect which organ?

The heart: dental work can push mouth bacteria into the bloodstream, and in people with artificial or damaged valves they can settle there and cause a dangerous infection, endocarditis.

The mcr-1 gene, which defeats a last-resort antibiotic, first turned up in the United States in 2016 in which bacterium?

E. coli from a Pennsylvania patient carried the gene, first reported months earlier in a pig in China. It defeats the drug colistin and sits on mobile DNA that bacteria can hand to one another.

Which class of antibiotics is linked to tendon damage when given with a systemic corticosteroid?

Quinolones carry the FDA's strongest warning for tendon rupture, and American doctors are now told to keep them for patients with no other option when treating sinus, chest and bladder infections.

Which antibiotic is classically linked to a disulfiram-like reaction, with flushing and vomiting, when mixed with alcohol?

Metronidazole carries the classic alcohol warning among antibiotics, yet a 2020 review found the reaction occurs with uncertain frequency, and a controlled trial in volunteers failed to produce it.

Gentamicin, a powerful hospital antibiotic, can harm the kidneys and permanently damage which of the senses?

Hearing: the damage to the inner ear is often permanent and can upset balance too, which is why doctors track blood levels of the drug and keep courses short.

Which ancient disease is now cured by a free course of combined antibiotics?

Leprosy is cured by a course of three antibiotics taken together, supplied free through the World Health Organization. Cases have fallen from millions in the 1980s to about 200,000 new ones a year.

Some antibiotics can also damage which organelle inside human cells?

The mitochondrion began as a free-living bacterium that merged with our ancestors' cells, and it still resembles one closely enough for some antibiotics to harm it.

Why had most big drug firms quit antibiotic research by the 2010s?

Low profits: an antibiotic is taken for days and, if it works, never again, so it returns far less than a pill for a lifelong condition. New ones are also held in reserve, which cuts sales further.

Phage therapy targets one bacterium so precisely that, unlike antibiotics, it largely spares what?

The gut microbiota: each phage attacks only its own kind of bacterium and leaves the body's helpful ones alone. The catch is finding a phage that matches each infection, so doctors often mix several.

Penicillin was rushed to survivors of which 1942 fire, one of the drug's first big tests on burns?

The Cocoanut Grove nightclub fire in Boston sent hundreds to hospital. Doctors' work on the survivors reshaped burn care, from early antibiotic treatment to the first clear accounts of smoke-damaged lungs.

Short of proper equipment, Oxford's penicillin team grew its early mould in which hospital item?

Bedpans gave the mould the wide, shallow surface it needed to reach the air, and they were pressed into service alongside baths, milk churns and food tins, all tended by a team of 'penicillin girls'.

The Peoria laboratory that scaled up penicillin production in 1941 belonged to which US government department?

Agriculture: the laboratory had been created under a 1938 law to find new industrial uses for farm crops, which is why it already had the fermentation vats and expertise that penicillin needed.

Moulds of the same genus as the one behind penicillin are deliberately grown in which food?

Blue cheese gets its veins and tang from a cousin of the penicillin mould. Scientists in the 19th century had already seen moulds holding bacteria at bay, but little was made of it for decades.

Why did Prontosil cure mice yet fail in a dish?

The body activates it: Prontosil does nothing by itself, but inside an animal it is split to release a smaller fragment that stops bacteria multiplying, as a Paris team showed in 1935.

What do doctors call antibiotic treatment that is started before tests have identified the bacterium?

Empiric therapy is an educated guess: culture results take a day or more, so doctors start with the drug most likely to cover the usual culprits and narrow it once the laboratory names the bacterium.

Most antibiotics in use were first found in bacteria that live where?

In soil: the thread-forming bacteria that live there, competing with the microbes crowding around them, make the chemicals behind most antibiotic families, which is why drug hunters still start by sifting dirt.

Flying to America in 1941, the Oxford scientists guarded against losing their penicillin mould by doing what?

Rubbing it into their coats meant that, if the sample vials were lost or stolen on the journey, spores of the mould could still be grown from the cloth.

Which antibiotic is known to make the contraceptive pill less reliable by speeding its breakdown in the liver?

Rifampicin is the proven exception: for most common antibiotics, studies have found no effect on the pill. It also turns urine, sweat and tears a harmless orange-red.

After some eighty years of use, penicillin still reliably kills the bacterium behind which common illness?

Strep throat: in all that time no strain of its bacterium has been found that resists penicillin, although the same germ has learned to shrug off several newer antibiotics.

Halicin, an antibiotic candidate announced by MIT in 2020, was picked out from thousands of chemicals by what?

An artificial-intelligence model flagged the molecule, a shelved diabetes drug, as a likely antibiotic. Its discoverers named it after HAL, the computer in '2001: A Space Odyssey'.

Gentamicin and tobramycin, mainstays against serious hospital infections, belong to which class of antibiotics?

Aminoglycosides kill the oxygen-using bacteria behind many serious hospital infections but do nothing against germs that live without air, so they are usually given alongside a second antibiotic.

The '-mycin' ending of antibiotic names such as erythromycin comes from the Greek word for what?

Fungus: yet the best-known '-mycin' drugs come from bacteria, a group that grows in fungus-like threads and was named accordingly.

Which disease, curable with antibiotics since the 1940s, was still the world's deadliest single infection in 2024?

Tuberculosis killed about 1.2 million people in 2024, more than any other single germ. Curing it is slow work: several antibiotics, taken every day for four to six months.

Luria and Delbrück's famous 1943 experiment showed that resistance in bacteria arises in what way?

By chance, before any exposure: separate cultures threw up wildly different numbers of survivors, the mark of random mutation and not of bacteria adapting on demand. The attacker they used was a virus, not a drug.

A 'superbug' enzyme first described in 2009 was controversially named after which city?

New Delhi: a Swedish patient picked up the resistant infection on a visit there, and the enzyme took the city's name. India's health ministry formally objected to the name.

Scientists showed that antibiotic resistance long predates medicine by finding resistance genes 30,000 years old in what?

Permafrost held ancient bacterial DNA carrying genes that defeat several modern antibiotic families: microbes had been making these chemicals, and resisting them, long before doctors borrowed the idea.

Which donor treatment cures most cases of a gut infection that antibiotics fail to clear?

A stool transplant cured about nine in ten patients in the first controlled trial, against roughly three in ten given another course of antibiotics, and the trial was halted early at its interim analysis.

Which gut bacterium causes the severe diarrhoea that can follow a course of antibiotics?

Clostridioides difficile spreads easily on hospital wards because it forms tough spores, so staff must scrub with soap and water and clean rooms with spore-killing disinfectants.

Which injected antibiotic, sidelined for years as too toxic, was revived as a mainstay against MRSA?

Vancomycin was pushed aside soon after its launch in the 1950s by drugs thought safer. The spread of MRSA brought it back, and doctors now track its level in the blood to dose it safely.

What name is given to hospital programmes that review antibiotic prescribing so the drugs are used only when needed?

Antibiotic stewardship teams check that each patient gets the right drug, dose and length of course. Pooled trials show they shorten courses, and probably hospital stays, with no rise in deaths.

Which ointment antibiotic is named after a girl whose broken leg yielded the microbe that makes it?

Bacitracin came from bacteria in a girl's shin fracture: Columbia bacteriologist Balbina Johnson named the helpful strain Tracy I after the patient.

Which 1949 film noir set in occupied Vienna turns on a racket in stolen, watered-down penicillin?

The Third Man builds to the unmasking of Harry Lime, whose gang raided military hospitals for the drug and sold the diluted doses on the black market, injuring or killing countless patients.

Which wartime leader's pneumonia was cured by M&B 693, a sulfa drug that also saved a circus lion?

Winston Churchill's bacterial pneumonia yielded to M&B 693, named for its makers May & Baker of Dagenham. The same drug saved Nero, a Royal Circus lion, in 1944.

Why did sulfa-drug pioneer Gerhard Domagk not collect his 1939 Nobel Prize until 1947?

The Nazi government forbade it: Hitler had barred Germans from accepting Nobel Prizes, and the Gestapo held Domagk for a week. He received his medal after the war, without the prize money.

Which phrase did Paul Ehrlich coin for a drug that would hit microbes while sparing the patient?

Magic bullet was Ehrlich's image, borrowed from the charmed bullets in Weber's opera Der Freischütz. In 1940 it gave a Hollywood film about his life its title.

Which insects guard their underground food gardens with antibiotic-making bacteria carried on their bodies?

Leafcutter ants feed cut leaves to the crop they farm underground, and Pseudonocardia bacteria on their bodies secrete antibiotics that stop a parasitic mould destroying it.

Which tick-borne illness, known for a bull's-eye rash, is usually cured with a course of doxycycline?

Lyme disease is caused by Borrelia bacteria, and doxycycline is the usual first choice because it also clears several other infections the same tick can carry.

Which common skin condition are the antibiotics doxycycline and minocycline often prescribed to clear up?

Acne has been treated with antibiotics so heavily that the skin bacterium behind it, C. acnes, has learned to shrug off the commonly used drugs in many parts of the world.

Which antibiotic, the parent of clindamycin, is named after the Nebraska capital where its source was found?

Lincomycin is made by Streptomyces lincolnensis, a bacterium named for Lincoln, Nebraska. Chemists later swapped one of its chemical groups for a chlorine atom to create clindamycin.

Sulfa drugs won fame in America in 1936 by curing the son of which president of a grave infection?

Franklin Roosevelt's son and namesake was gravely ill when Prontosil cured him, and the front-page headlines that followed opened the era of antibacterial drugs in the United States.

Which family of antibiotics did researchers in Milan name after a French heist film of 1955?

Rifamycins came out of the Lepetit laboratories in Milan in the late 1950s, where the team nicknamed the new substances Rififi after the crime thriller, popular at the time.

Which American company turned its citric acid fermentation know-how to mass-producing wartime penicillin?

Pfizer had learned to brew citric acid from sugar with a mould when its Italian raw material ran short, and by 1919 was selling the result. Those deep-tank skills suited penicillin.

Erythromycin came from samples that Abelardo Aguilar collected in his home province in which country?

The Philippines gave erythromycin its first brand name, Ilosone, after the province of Iloilo where Aguilar gathered the samples. He received no further credit or payment for the find.

Azithromycin was discovered in 1980 at Pliva, a drug company in which country, then part of Yugoslavia?

Croatia's capital, Zagreb, is home to Pliva, which licensed its find to an American firm that sold it in the West as Zithromax.

Mupirocin ointment is applied to which part of the body to clear MRSA from carriers before surgery?

The nose can harbour MRSA without causing any symptoms, and treating it with mupirocin before an operation helps to prevent wound infections afterwards.

Nitrofurantoin reaches useful strength in just one part of the body, so it treats infections of which organ?

The bladder gets far more nitrofurantoin than anywhere else, because the drug is concentrated in what the kidneys excrete and stays weak in the blood and tissues.

What is the medical term for giving antibiotics to prevent an infection, as surgeons do before an operation?

Prophylaxis before surgery mainly prevents infections at the skin incision; it is less effective against infections deep inside the body.

Dairy foods and antacids can block the absorption of doxycycline because the drug binds to which mineral?

Calcium grips the drug in the gut: dairy cuts the amount of doxycycline reaching the blood by about a fifth, and of some older relatives by half.

Which yeast often overgrows after a course of antibiotics has wiped out its bacterial rivals, causing thrush?

Candida is present in most healthy people's mouths and intestines, held in check by the bacteria that compete with it for the same space.

Which bacteria-dissolving enzyme did penicillin's discoverer find in nasal mucus, years before his famous mould?

Lysozyme, a name its finder coined himself, turned out to be present in tears, saliva and human milk as well.

Aureomycin, an antibiotic found in 1945 in soil from a Missouri field, was named after which colour?

Gold was the colour of the drug itself, an intense yellow, so both the antibiotic and the bacterium that makes it, found by Benjamin Duggar, got names built on the Latin for golden.

Which antibiotic, the first made synthetically on a large scale, comes from a bacterium named after Venezuela?

Chloramphenicol was isolated from Streptomyces venezuelae in 1947, and within two years a Parke-Davis team including chemist Mildred Rebstock had worked out how to build it from scratch.

Mass handouts of azithromycin are part of the WHO's SAFE strategy against which blinding eye infection?

Trachoma is spread by a chlamydia bacterium that a single dose of azithromycin by mouth can clear, which makes it practical to treat every person in an affected district at once.

In the Kirby–Bauer test, what is the clear circle called where bacteria fail to grow around an antibiotic disc?

Zone of inhibition size is measured and compared with reference tables: in general, the larger the circle, the lower the dose of that drug needed to halt the microbe's growth.

Which antibiotic, announced in 2015, was found by growing 'unculturable' bacteria in a device called the iChip?

Teixobactin came from a bacterium in a grassy field in Maine, coaxed to grow by sealing single cells in the chip and burying it back in the ground they came from.

Gramicidin S, an antibiotic rushed into military hospitals in 1942, takes its 'S' from which country of origin?

The Soviet Union's Georgy Gause discovered it with his wife Maria Brazhnikova, and the find was prized so highly that he escaped the persecution many of his fellow biologists suffered.

Which member of Oxford's penicillin team devised its purification method yet was left out of the 1945 Nobel Prize?

Norman Heatley developed the back-extraction technique that purified penicillin in bulk. Oxford made amends in 1990 with the first honorary doctorate of medicine it had ever given a non-medic.

Which graduate student found Selman Waksman's Nobel-winning antibiotic in a basement lab, then sued for credit?

Albert Schatz won a 1950 settlement that named him co-discoverer and gave him 3% of the royalties, and Rutgers later turned his basement laboratory into a museum.

Clindamycin and neomycin, from unrelated drug families, both stop bacteria by binding to which cell structure?

The ribosome is the cell's protein factory, and the bacterial kind differs enough from the human one for drugs to jam it without harming the patient's own cells.

Levofloxacin kills bacteria by blocking which enzyme, which supercoils their DNA so that it fits inside the cell?

Gyrase is one of two related bacterial enzymes the drug jams. The other, topoisomerase IV, is needed to separate the copied DNA before a cell divides.

Fidaxomicin and rifabutin both kill bacteria by blocking which enzyme, halting the transcription of their genes?

RNA polymerase reads DNA to make the messages a cell builds proteins from, and fidaxomicin stops it by pinning the enzyme's moving 'switch regions' in place.

Sulfonamides starve bacteria by blocking their synthesis of which vitamin, which humans simply get from food?

Folate is built by bacteria from a small molecule called PABA, and sulfonamides work by impersonating it, so the microbe's enzyme grabs the drug instead.

Colistin, an antibiotic of last resort, kills bacteria by acting on their membranes like which household product?

Detergent is the right comparison because colistin has a water-loving part and a fat-loving part, so it dissolves the bacterial membrane much as soap lifts grease.

Teicoplanin stops bacteria building peptidoglycan by gripping which dipeptide at the tip of each new unit?

D-alanyl-D-alanine is where cross-linking enzymes must work to knit new units into the mesh, so with teicoplanin clamped over it the bacterium's armour is left unfinished.

Isoniazid, switched on only inside its target bacteria, blocks their production of which coat-building molecules?

Mycolic acids are essential to the tough coat of mycobacteria, and the drug's trigger is one of the microbe's own enzymes, a catalase-peroxidase called KatG.

Daptomycin punches holes in bacterial membranes, yet fails against pneumonia because what inactivates it?

Lung surfactant, the film that lowers surface tension in the air sacs so they inflate easily, binds daptomycin so avidly that too little is left to fight an infection there.

Which term describes antibiotics that stop bacteria multiplying and leave the immune system to finish them off?

Bacteriostatic drugs are not a sealed category: at high concentrations some of them kill outright, while low doses of some killing drugs merely hold bacteria in check.

The mould behind the first cephalosporins was found in 1945 in seawater by a sewer outfall off which island?

Sardinia was home to pharmacologist Giuseppe Brotzu, who found the mould in the sea near Cagliari. Its product, cephalosporin C, was later isolated at Oxford.

Which American drug company launched cefalotin, the first cephalosporin to reach the market, in 1964?

Eli Lilly made cefalotin by altering the side chains on the natural compound's core, the approach that went on to produce the many later members of the family.

Which Oxford biochemist patented cephalosporin and devoted the income to charitable trusts for medical research?

Edward Abraham's cephalosporin funds had given Oxford more than £30 million by the end of the twentieth century, paying for laboratories, scholarships and a college science centre.

Ceftriaxone is a drug of choice for which dangerous infection because it passes readily into cerebrospinal fluid?

Meningitis caused by pneumococci, meningococci or Haemophilus influenzae all responds to ceftriaxone, which penetrates the body's tissues and fluids unusually well.

Which fifth-generation cephalosporin, approved in America in 2010, stands out for its activity against MRSA?

Ceftaroline is sold as Teflaro in the United States and Zinforo in Europe, and its first approvals were for skin infections and pneumonia caught outside hospital.

Ceftazidime is one of the few cephalosporins that can kill which bacterium, a menace in cystic fibrosis?

Pseudomonas aeruginosa shrugs off most of the family, but ceftazidime is unusually stable against the enzymes that bacteria use to destroy such drugs.

Which food-borne bacterium, a danger in pregnancy linked to soft cheeses, is untouched by most cephalosporins?

Listeria is one of the classic gaps in the family's coverage: cephalosporins of the first four generations cannot treat it, so doctors must reach for a different class.

Which first-generation cephalosporin is often the preferred drug given before surgery to prevent infections?

Cefazolin is also given around childbirth to protect newborns from group B streptococcal infection when the mother cannot take penicillin.

Cefiderocol slips into bacteria 'Trojan horse'-style by latching onto which metal that they actively import?

Iron is actively transported into bacterial cells, and cefiderocol, the first antibiotic of its kind to win US approval, binds the metal and rides in with it.

Cefepime, a cephalosporin patented in 1982 and approved in 1994, belongs to which generation of the family?

Fourth is the generation that paired strong activity against both major groups of bacteria: cefepime outperforms its third-generation predecessors on each.

People taking doxycycline are advised to cover up outdoors because the drug raises their risk of what?

Sunburn is listed among doxycycline's common side effects, alongside nausea, vomiting, diarrhoea and abdominal pain.

Besides treating infections, doxycycline is taken by travellers to prevent which mosquito-borne disease?

Malaria parasites are slow to die under doxycycline, completing one more round of replication first, so the drug is used to prevent the illness but never alone to treat it.

Which tropical disease did the WHO target for eradication after a single dose of azithromycin proved able to cure it?

Yaws used to need a penicillin injection, but a trial on Lihir Island found that one dose of azithromycin by mouth cut its prevalence from 2.4% to 0.3% within a year.