Science tale! Let’s talk about how 75 years ago a man watching kids swim in sewage saved millions of lives. (The pic is him, not just some rando)

OK, so it’s the 1940s and Sardinia is in disaster mode. WW2 has trashed Sardinia and there’s a typhoid outbreak. Y’know, the thing that kills the kid Jane gets into bed with in Jane Eyre? Nasty. Makes you shit yourself to death.

Caused by a bacterium called Salmonella Typhi

So Giuseppe Brotzu , the dude in the picture, he’s the local pharmacologist and he decides to drop some John Snow on the outbreak.

No, not the no-nothing git from Game of Thrones. The Dr who in 1854 mapped a cholera outbreak and traced it to the local water pump using this map.

Brotzu does the same, but finds the OPPOSITE. The kids who are jumping in the water off Su Siccu in Cagliari are *not* getting sick. Hmm!

And Su Siccu is where the sewer goes out. So he starts to wonder and the magic powers of swimming with turds.

Of course there are no magic bum beans in the water. But like a good scientist Brotzu takes samples. And he finds some mould in the sewer (because, duh, it’s a sewer) and takes it home with him.

Now antibiotics at this point are BRAND NEW. The days we could waste them like Smarties and create MRSA were in the future. And at that point all antibiotics attacked Gram positive bacteria. They could not kill Gram negative.

But Brotzu’s mould could.

Sidebar: Gram +/- is whether the bacterium is stained violet using a method designed by a guy named Gram (+ve), or whether they are stained red instead (-ve).

It’s to do with what their cell walls are made of - and making a cell wall go pop is an ace way to murder bacteria.

Anyway holy shit Sardinian shit mould, Cephalosporium acremonium, kills Gram -ve bacteria! This could save millions of lives! But Brotzu knows his lab is trash (Italy lost WW2) so sends it to Oxford University.

And the Brits nick his idea.

That’s harsh. Guy Newton and Edward Abraham (Who went to my old school!) are the penicillin experts. And with somebody help from the GOD QUEEN OF CRYSTALLOGRAPHY, the amazing Nobel prize winning Dorothy Mary CROWFOOT Hodgkin, they discover cephalosporin C.

Sidebar 2: Y’know how Hodgkin’s Nobel prize win was announced by the Daily Mail? Like so. Gross.

But not as gross of dying from typhoid! Cephalosporin C gave rise to a whole new class of antibiotics which killed penicillin-resistant bugs before we wasted them and doomed us to an antibiotic-free apocalypse.

So yay Giuseppe Brotzu! Yay swimming in poop!

What happened to Brotzu? Went into politics and became mayor of Cagliari.

Pretty cool really.