Next, you need to find a sick volunteer. This is risky to the volunteer if there is an alternative treatment that works. It could waste valuable time if the drug doesn’t work, making them more sick. In some cases, using both an alternative treatment (like sulfa drugs) together with a possible antibiotic is a good idea, because sulfa drugs work more slowly. The idea is to see if the drug works to slow or stop the disease. If so, then it has passed the second step in testing the drug.
Finally, the drug is tested against any alternative treatments to see if it does as well or better than any alternatives. If it does, then you have an antibiotic.
But don’t celebrate yet!
Drug Production
Making flasks of the antibiotic for testing has been done. But translating that into mass production is a far more difficult problem. First, they will need larger equipment that can be sterilized, so it doesn’t get contaminated. Stainless steel vats are probably required. Large quantities of food for what is grown is required. Because it only grows where there is air present, on the surface, lots of sterilized air will need to be bubbled thru the vat, and the contents of the vat agitated, like a giant bread mixer. The fluid will need to be drawn off, either continuously or in a batch process, and the drug isolated from the fluid and purified.
There is then one last step. Many antibiotics produced in this manner have problems being administered to people. Penicillin produced this way needs to be injected, because it breaks down in stomach acid. In this form, the body removes about 95% of it through urine. Modifying it chemically into a slightly different drug can permit it to survive in the stomach, be retained in the bloodstream, and generally be more effective. This will require figuring out what they have actually made, so that it can be modified into a known form by following some steps similar to drug synthesis.
Synthesized Drugs
Synthesized drugs are those that are made by taking other, more easily made chemicals, and processing them to produce the desired drug. In one way, this is better than hunting for an antibiotic, in that there is a specific process to produce the drug. If the source chemicals are pure, and the processes are not done in a faulty manner, then by doing step one, then step two, then step three, and so on, the drug can be consistently produced. But there are lots of steps, and each one needs to be done correctly, with the right ingredients, at the right temperature, and in the correct order.
The source chemicals are limited to what can be obtained or made by Grantville in the early 1630s. As all these drugs require variants of a chemical called benzene, that is one starting point. The easiest way to produce benzene in quantity is from coal tar. This is made by baking coal to a very high temperature. A number of flammable gases are produced, and these gases are captured, cooled, and carefully separated. Benzene is one of the products. Roughly ten pounds of benzene can be extracted from every ton of coal. This is then processed through a series of steps, along with other chemicals made by Grantville, until the desired drugs are produced.
Some of these chemicals are difficult to make, and can be quite dangerous if misused. Exposure to benzene, for example, can cause liver cancer. Again, another critical factor is purity. If another chemical is present with the one that is required, it could contaminate the process. This makes the results of all the previous steps worthless, and requires starting over again.
One example of a chemical that is difficult and dangerous to make is a special acid, produced by cooking sulfuric acid and chlorine gas under moderate pressure. Both ingredients are highly corrosive and poisonous. (Chlorine was used as a poison gas during World War I.) That means that stainless steel is almost a necessity to safely produce the acid.
Many other chemicals are similarly dangerous in a variety of ways, some exploding when mixed with water, a few burning when simply combined with air. Almost all are poisonous in one way or another.