| 词源 |
antibiotic. Dr. Selman Waksman, the discoverer of strepto- mycin, invented the term antibiotic in 1941. He coined it from the Greek bios, life, and anti, against. Thus an antibiotic is, strictly speaking, “against life”—against that life that seeks to destroy other life. An earlier sense of antibiotic, defined as “op- posed to a belief in the presence or possibility of life,” was re- corded in 1860. |