Chapter 47: The Birth of Liquid Gold, Penicillin—We Are Truly Filthy Rich Now
"Is it true? Professor Tang and his team have really developed that stuff?"
Su Changqing asked, looking at his guard with extreme excitement.
The Professor Tang mentioned by Su Changqing was a renowned microbiologist and virologist in the Great Xia, and one of the discoverers of Chlamydia trachomatis.
In 1921, Professor Tang graduated from Xiangya Medical College with a doctorate in medicine.
In 1925, he was recommended to study at the Harvard Medical School in the Lighthouse Country.
He returned to China in 1929, successively serving as an associate professor at the National Central University in Shanghai and a professor at the Shanghai Medical College.
In 1935, he went to the National Institute for Medical Research in the Great British Empire for advanced studies.
He returned to China in 1937.
Under normal historical trajectories, it would have been impossible for Professor Tang to come to the Wutai Mountain base area.
However!
Among the large number of Beiping university students and professors that Su Changqing had previously rescued, some had a very close relationship with Professor Tang.
You must know!
Top figures in the scientific research community mostly belong to specific circles.
This was the interpersonal network of the academic world. Su Changqing utilized the relationship networks of these professors and students to recruit another large batch of scientific researchers to work in the Wutai Mountain base area.
Of course, this was also influenced by the "ideological imprint" skill carried by the system.
Whether it was the actions to save the nation through resistance or the rescue of numerous professors and students who were on the verge of falling under the butcher knives of the Japanese devils.
All of these earned Su Changqing an exceptional reputation within academic circles.
The better the impression they had of Su Changqing, the purer and more dedicated the researchers were to their scientific pursuits.
The more they possessed a "pure and untainted heart," the more susceptible such figures were, under the influence of the system's "ideological imprint" skill, to coming to the Wutai Mountain base area and placing themselves under Su Changqing's command.
Professor Tang, along with a group of his close friends in the biological sciences and a considerable number of students,
were thus "lured" by Su Changqing into the Wutai Mountain base area.
Of course, as someone possessing the system,
Su Changqing utilized his connections with the Polar Bear Country to resolve essential problems for these researchers, such as experimental equipment and laboratory facilities.
Furthermore, the output from the gold mines and the wealth acquired by the First Red Independent Division through various channels were heavily invested in Professor Tang's research team.
The reason Su Changqing made such a massive investment was naturally purposeful.
After all!
If Professor Tang and the others succeeded according to Su Changqing's vision, then both Su Changqing and the First Red Independent Division—
even the entire Red Army—would possess a hen that could lay "golden eggs."
Naturally!
Beyond the issue of money, if the vast commanders and fighters of the Red Army were infected by bacteria on the battlefield and found themselves on the brink of life and death,
this research achievement, worthy of being called epoch-making, could pull tens of thousands of Red Army soldiers and anti-Japanese heroes back from the edge of death.
That's right!
The epoch-making research achievement developed with Su Changqing's massive investment, coupled with the strong support provided by the system's "absolute comprehension" skill and related reference materials, was the world-famous "penicillin."
"Penicillin," known as liquid gold.
As everyone knows.
The birth of penicillin stemmed from an accidental discovery by the British bacteriologist Alexander Fleming.
In 1928, during his research at St. Mary's Hospital in London, Fleming noticed a clear zone devoid of bacterial growth surrounding a culture dish contaminated by Penicillium mold.
Through further research, he confirmed that this Penicillium mold could secrete a substance with powerful bactericidal properties and named it penicillin.
However, due to the technological limitations of the time, Fleming failed to solve the problem of penicillin purification, preventing its clinical application for a long time.
It was not until 1939 that Howard Florey's team at Oxford University re-focused on the challenge and resolved the difficulties of penicillin extraction and purification.
By 1942, penicillin began to be used on the battlefield to treat wounded soldiers, particularly during the 1944 Normandy landings.
The widespread application of penicillin drastically reduced the infection and mortality rates among the wounded, marking the first large-scale clinical application of penicillin.
Today, empowered by the system
and assisted by the system's relevant data,
Professor Tang and his team actually succeeded in purifying penicillin at a speed that far exceeded Su Changqing's expectations.
While deeply shocked, Su Changqing was naturally overjoyed.
Under the leadership of Professor Tang, his scientific research team—including Professor Fan, Professor Wei, Professor Zhu, Professor Huang, Professor Lu, and other scientists—relied on certain data provided by the system
and the empowerment of the "absolute comprehension" skill. After countless experiments, they finally made a breakthrough.
Using Penicillium chrysogenum isolated from discarded items such as old leather shoes, and employing an innovative liquid-surface cultivation method, they successfully developed the world's first batch of penicillin, with each bottle containing 50,000 units.
Not only that, they also cleverly devised a method using a saturated ethanol solution of potassium acetate as a crystallizing agent, allowing penicillin potassium salt to crystallize directly from the refined solution.
This move!
Created the conditions for the large-scale mass production and application of penicillin.
One only needed to understand the miraculous effects of penicillin to realize just how incalculable the value created by Professor Tang's team was this time.
Even by 1943, the price of penicillin astonishingly reached 830 million US dollars per ton.
This value even surpassed that of 675 tons of gold at the time. Such a price was enough to purchase 3,721 B-17 bombers of the Lighthouse Country's military, or 5,210 Tiger tanks of the Germanic military, or even 530,000 heavy machine guns.
With penicillin!
It was equivalent to having an absolute cash flow.
Of course!
More importantly, the all-out war between the Great Xia and the Japanese devils was imminent.
Su Changqing was about to reinforce places like Nanjing and other locations.
A fierce battle!
Would inevitably result in heavy casualties.
During the 1944 Normandy landings, the Allied forces were equipped with large quantities of penicillin.
Thanks to this, the disease mortality rate of the Lighthouse Country's soldiers in World War II dropped from 1.41% to 0.06%, saving two hundred thousand lives.
To Su Changqing, the life of every single soldier was extremely important.
And a veteran of a hundred battles was an even more precious asset on the battlefield.
The existence of penicillin meant that more comrades-in-arms would not die from bacterial infections.
To say the least.
If Dr. Bethune—whom the headquarters leaders praised as "a noble man, a pure man, a moral man, a man who has transcended low-level interests, a man who is beneficial to the people"—could have obtained a single dose of penicillin,
he would not have ultimately sacrificed his life due to a bacterial infection.
Therefore, one can well imagine the importance of penicillin.
"Professor Tang!"
"On behalf of the First Red Independent Division, the Red Army, and the military personnel of Great Xia, I thank you for your dedication."
"If this miraculous medicine can be mass-produced, it will save the lives of countless heroes."
"At the same time, the emergence of this miraculous medicine is sufficient to subvert the global landscape."
"It will also give us more leverage to obtain more of what we need."
Su Changqing straightened his posture and saluted Professor Tang and his team military-style.
The birth of penicillin!
Provided a perfect solution to the base area's funding shortage.
At the same time, it provided superb assistance for Su Changqing to lead the First Red Independent Division to Nanjing and other places to fight against the Japanese devils.