【英语时差8,16】青霉素的历史（上）

（单词翻译）

 Today, a fever is an uncomfortable nuisance, but a hundred-plus years ago, fevers were often fatal. The difference between then and now is the class of drugs known as antibiotics¹. As the name implies, “anti-biotics” work “against life,” or, more specifically, against living cells. While other drugs, such as aspirin², ease the symptoms of a disease, antibiotics attack the living bacteria that are causing the symptoms. The modern discovery of antibiotics is usually attributed to Alexander Fleming, who was the first to isolate³ and name “penicillin.” But the basis for Fleming’s work had begun over fifty years before. In 1874, another English scientist, William Roberts, noticed that some fungi⁴ were immune to bacteria. Later on, the French scientist Louis Pasteur noticed that bacteria stopped growing if they became infected with a microscopic⁵ fungus⁶ called “penicillium.”