Andrew J. Moyer

Andrew Jackson Moyer
Born November 30, 1899
Van Buren Township, Pulaski County, Indiana, USA
Died February 17, 1959
Bay Pines, Florida, USA
Known for Optimizing the first process for the industrial manufacturing of penicillin

Andrew Jackson Moyer (November 30, 1899 – February 17, 1959) was an American microbiologist who is known mainly for his work on the development of industrial production methods for various microorganisms. Moyer held four patents individually (US #2423873 for the fermentation method of culturing microorganisms, US #2442141 for the use of a nutrient medium of corn steep liquor, glucose, and sodium for the process, US #2443989 for submerged cultures, and US #2476107 for the use of lactose as a slowly assimilating energy source). His research was associated with a total of 10 US patents. He was born in the northern Indiana farming community of Van Buren Township in Pulaski County to Edward Reuben Moyer and Minnie McCloud Moyer.

Early life and education

Andrew Jackson Moyer was born in Van Buren Township near Star City, Indiana, on November 30, 1899, to Edward R. and Minnie Moyer, who were farmers. When he was two years old, his mother died and he went to live with his neighbors, the Osborn family, who raised him until he was 15 years old. During that time, he attended a local grammar school where he was trained in the classics. In 1914, Moyer moved to Logansport, Indiana, to live with his father and stepmother for four years.

In October 1918, he joined the US Army's Student Training Corps at Wabash College, a small, private, all-male liberal arts college in Crawfordsville, Indiana. World War I ended the month after he enlisted, and he was never called to duty. Instead, he was discharged with the rank of Private in December, and for his services he was rewarded with a full scholarship to finance his education. He graduated from Wabash with an A.B. in 1922.

Moyer spent the next year at the University of Wisconsin, where he found the interest that guided the rest of his career – microbial nutrition – after he worked closely with Professors Elmer V. McCollum and Harry Steenbok, who were pioneers in the field at the time. In pursuit of his newfound interest, Moyer transferred to the North Dakota Agricultural College, where he earned an M.S. in 1925. From there, he moved to the University of Maryland, College Park, where he earned his doctorate in Plant Pathology in 1929. Moyer's dissertation was titled "Studies in the Growth Response of Fungi to Boron, Manganese and Zinc."

In 1931, Moyer married Dorothy Randall Phillips, whom he met during his work on his doctorate at the University of Maryland. They had no children.

Work on penicillin

After his graduation, Moyer accepted a research position with the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Bureau of Plant Industry, where he worked under Dr. Orville E. May at the Arlington Experiment Farm in Virginia. For ten years, he was a mycologist there, and he studied the genetic and biochemical properties of fungi.

In December 1940, Dr. May became director of the USDA's newly created Northern Research Laboratory (a government research facility founded to develop industrial applications of agricultural sciences) and asked Moyer to join him. Moyer agreed, and he prepared to study mold of corn and wheat using large-scale fermentation. At the time, he did not know that in less than a year he would be working on a project that would save millions of lives and change the world of medicine for ever.

As far back as 1928, Alexander Fleming, a Scottish bacteriologist, had discovered a mold with extraordinary bacteria-killing powers. For a decade, European scientists had been trying to devise techniques to mass-produce this mold (which Fleming had termed penicillin), but none of them were successful. With the outbreak of World War II in 1939, and the consequent death and destruction of human life the world witnessed, the search for a technique to mass-produce penicillin intensified. Governments around the world wanted to find a way to mass-produce this mysterious mold which could destroy the bacteria that caused pneumonia, diphtheria, typhoid, tuberculosis, cholera and many more diseases so that they could cure their wounded.

In July 1941 Prof. Howard Florey and Dr. Norman Heatley, scientists from the University of Oxford in England, brought a small sample of the mold to the United States in search of a way to mass-produce penicillin. Up until that point, scientists and chemists had been able to produce only enough penicillin for successful clinical trials on a few patients at the Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford. Florey and Heatley persuaded a laboratory in Peoria, Illinois, to develop larger scale manufacturing. In Peoria, Heatley was assigned to work with Moyer. Moyer suggested adding corn steep liquor (a by-product of the wet-milling process), to the growth medium. With this and other changes, such as using lactose in place of glucose, they were able to push up yields of penicillin to 20 units per ml.

Florey returned to Oxford that September, but Heatley stayed, refining the production methods with Moyer until December 1941. The following year, back in Oxford, Florey and Heatley learned that Moyer had published their research results but omitted Heatley's name from the paper, despite an original contract which stipulated that any publications should be jointly authored. Moyer had financial motives for taking all the credit to himself. To have acknowledged Heatley's part of the work would have made it difficult to apply for patents with himself as sole inventor, which is what he did.

Moyer continued to refine the process for three years, and by 1944, he and his colleagues had completed their work and had perfected a practical method for the mass production of penicillin – they had finally found a way to produce penicillin in industrial fermentation. Later that year, the first commercial plant for penicillin production opened in Brooklyn, New York. The plant was a success; production skyrocketed and the plant produced enough penicillin to treat all severely injured Allied soldiers on D-Day.

Implications of his work

Because of Moyer's work, the Allies were able to produce 2.3 million doses of penicillin in time for the invasion of Normandy in the spring of 1944. This development had a major impact on the number of deaths and amputations among Allied forces; penicillin saved an estimated 12%–15% of Allied lives.

Another direct consequence of Moyer's work was a phenomenal drop in the price of penicillin. The price dropped from nearly priceless in 1940, to $20 per dose in July 1943, to $0.55 per dose by 1946. Because of this development, penicillin became widely available around the world after Moyer's methodology was published in 1945 after the wartime secrecy of the time ended.

However, the implications of Moyer’s work extended far beyond those witnessed during his time. Because of his research, penicillin could now be studied by labs around the world, and this led to the development of various forms of penicillin, each of which are effective against different strains of bacteria. Moyer's process of penicillin production provided a model for all other antibiotic fermentations, and his corn steep liquor mixture method is still used in the commercial fermentation processes of penicillin and many other antibiotics today.

Later years and death

After World War II, wartime secrecy ended, and consequently Moyer was free to publish his research on penicillin. Between 1947 and 1949, Moyer filed for and was granted four patents regarding his work on penicillin. On the other side of the Atlantic, neither Alexander Fleming nor Howard Florey – who undeniably discovered and isolated penicillin – took out patents, since British law at the time only granted patents for the processes involved in making drugs, and not for the drugs themselves. Consequently, outrage in Europe erupted, and Moyer and other scientists at the Northern Research Laboratory were accused of stealing British ideas. Although several British pharmaceutical companies used Moyer's patented processes to culture penicillin, none of them paid him royalties of any kind. However, in 1950, the Allies went to war in Korea, and the controversy regarding the matter died down.

Moyer continued to work for the Northern Research Laboratory until he retired in 1957. He died two years later on February 17, 1959, after a month-long illness at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Bay Pines, Florida. He was buried in Parklawn Memorial Cemetery in Rockville, Maryland.

Legacy

Dr. Moyer was posthumously named to the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 1987; he was the first government researcher ever to be inducted. The Andrew J. Moyer fund was also established at the University of Maryland on January 31, 1977. It was made possible by a donation by his widow, Mrs. Dorothy R. Moyer, and it is awarded to outstanding graduate students studying microbiology.

Patents

References

Further reading

External links

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