Canada today produces more dried; blood serum for war needs than is produced in Great Britain, Surgeon Capt. C. H. Best, Director of Medi cal Research, R.C.N., told members of the Royal Canadian Institute Saturday night in an address on medical advances during the war. At the same time he announced that two colleagues of the Banting and Best Medical Research Department and the Department of Pathology and Bacteriology. Drs. Phillip Greey and S. S. MacDonald, will be co-directors of the new penicillin laboratory now being installed in old Knox College on Spadina Ave. for big-scale production of the war drug.
With motion pictures and slides to illustrate his talk, Capt. Best re- viewed the history of progress of two of the most important advances in medical history, the development of blood serum method of providing the equivalent of a transfusion by simple means and without the problems such as seeking the type of blood of the patient. He paid tribute to the organizations who had made the plan a national contribution to the war effort, ranging from research by Connaught Laboratories to recruiting of civilian donations of blood by the Red Cross.
As evidence of the phenomenal growth of the plan, Capt. Best revealed that in 1940 there were 5.320 donations of blood; in 1942 it had reached 179,983, and so far in 1943) it had totalled 479,053. Canadian blood serum had been used at, Dunkirk and Dieppe, on convoys to Russia and in the Mediterranean; in hospitals in England, and wherever Canadian troops were being treated, and at such events as rescue efforts at bombed centres. Postwar uses for blood serum, he saw, in Red Cross outpost hospitals and similar places where adequate blood transfusion equipment or skill were unobtainable.
The number of diseases susceptible to treatment by penicillin was increasing almost daily, said Capt. Best, after outlining the discovery of the drug by Prof. Alexander Fleming of London, England, and its isolation by Dr. Howard Florey of Oxford. In a recent visit to Eng- land he had met Florey, whom he had known for 18 years. Capt. Best said, and the latter had described personal experience in the Mediterranean area where penicillin was curing serious cases of infected wounds with "relatively small amounts applied locally" thereby curing conditions which might other wise have required greater amounts for injection.
The amount of penicillin available for some considerable time would be greatly restricted, Capt. Best said, because of the armed services' needs and the lengthy process of production, which he described with motion pictures taken by the scientists) who worked at the Banting Institute. He paid great tribute to Dr. Phillip Greey, C. C. Lucas, Alice Greey, William Boyd and S. S. Mac- Donald for their research on penicillin in Canada and their development of the pilot plant process which was now being applied to the big-scale production to be done under the supervision of Connaught Laboratories workers.