Recreating Tuberculomucin – getting started

From Judy Weleminsky - blog no 1

Dr Friedrich Weleminsky left an excellent unpublished paper on how to make and use Tuberculomucin. His granddaughter, Dr Charlotte Jones, updated it and attempted to get medical researchers interested. Thankfully University College London, where she had studied as a doctor, expressed interest. 

They arranged for Carole Reeves to do some historical research and her paper Tuberculomucin: A forgotten Treatment for Tuberculosis had a great reception when it was presented to the Medical Society of London on 13 April 2015.

 UCL also agreed to do some fundamental microbiological research, but the initial research they carried out failed and they discontinued it.  

Charlotte was finding it increasingly difficult to pursue progress on the research due to being in her late 80s and living in Wales, so I took over the mantle. I am Judy Weleminsky, another granddaughter of Friedrich’s but 23 years younger and I live in London. The lab explained that they didn’t have the resources of money or people to carry out further research.

Judy Weleminsky

Reading Friedrich’s paper it seemed to me that the process for recreating Tuberculomucin was clearly laid out though it was also obvious that it would take many years to achieve anything. As I am retired, I offered to do it as a volunteer and much to my surprise they agreed! I offered to commit to working for a number of years as the process involved culturing the bacteria over two or more years, so I suggested 3-5 years at 1 to 2 days per week and that seemed acceptable.  

Unlike Charlotte who was a GP during her working life, I have never studied medicine and the last science I learnt was as a teenager doing A-levels. But I was happy to give it a go and in October 2017, I started getting training as a microbiologist.