No. 3?

Like scientists everywhere, Britain's were looking for a new antibiotic. They hoped for something good enough to put on the same shelf with penicillin and streptomycin.

Last week, after ten years and 1,000 experiments, stocky Scotsman George Brownlee, 37, thought he had something. His research team at Wellcome Physiological Laboratory, Beckenham, Kent, had produced a new antibiotic from bacteria (Bacillus aerosporus) found in soil from a market garden. The antibiotic is called aerosporin (pronounced a-ross-poe-rin). The researchers' tests and findings were reported with cautious excitement in Lancet.

In test tubes, aerosporin proved many times more effective than streptomycin, weight for weight, against typhoid, dysentery, cholera, the plague, other intestinal infections. In mice, it worked against the whooping cough organism (which defies other antibiotics), typhoid, possibly against enteric fever.

It also worked in its first test on human beings--ten children, one month to 2 1/2 years old, suffering from whooping cough. All showed definite improvement in the first 48 hours. (Two of the children later died, but neither death was due either to whooping cough or to aerosporin.)

One big advantage of aerosporin: thus far bacteria have had a hard time developing resistance to it. One drawback: like streptomycin and other antibiotics, it may cause slight damage to the kidneys. Dr. Brownlee is sure that the kidney damage is caused by an impurity, which can eventually be removed. Meantime, the impurity is counteracted by an amino acid.

Aerosporin looks good, but the final returns are not yet in. The British Ministry of Health thinks enough of it to help its discoverers with tests on typhoid fever.

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