Medicine: New Antibiotic

After testing scores of thousands of soil samples from all over the world, researchers for Charles Pfizer & Co. Inc. announced last week that they had isolated a new and promising antibiotic from a piece of Indiana dirt. The drug, named terramycin (earth mold) by its Brooklyn discoverers, is secreted by a tiny organism, Streptomyces rimosus, of the same group which has produced three other major antibiotics —streptomycin, aureomycin and Chloromycetin.

In the test tube and in laboratory animals, terramycin kills heavy growths of bacteria which cause one of the commonest forms of pneumonia, streptococcal infections, typhoid fever, and many intestinal and urinary tract infections. These are the disease germs against which antibiotics already in use are most effective. So if terramycin shows up well in the tests, now beginning, on humans, it will give doctors an extra weapon of a familiar type, rather than a basically new one.