Medicine: Limburger’s Secret Weapon

The strong smell of Limburger has inspired many a moldy joke, but the news of Limburger last week was a serious and hopeful matter. The moldy-looking coating of the cheese, a young scientist reports, contains a potent antibiotic that kills many kinds of microbes and has probably saved a lot of lives.

Limburger research got going ten years ago when a San Francisco bachelor died of botulism after gourmandizing on a jar of cheese spread. The National Cheese Institute wanted to learn how to prevent such deaths, which are caused by microbes that sometimes get into spreads and make botulin, the deadliest natural poison known. The University of Chicago’s Food Research Institute took on the job, assigned Polish-born Microbiologist Nicholas Grecz to work on it. Grecz was led to Limburger because, as early as the 1880s, Limburger-type cheeses had been observed never to cause food poisoning. Nobody knew why.

“Because we were working with the dangerous Clostridium botulinum bacteria,” says Dr. Grecz, “we were put in a greenhouse away from the main buildings” —though his smelly raw materials also had something to do with his isolation. Undaunted, Grecz discovered that a common microbe, Brevibacterium linens, found on many soft, surface-ripened cheeses, manufactures an antibiotic that kills off many other microbes, though it is harmless to man. Among the vulnerable microbes is the bug of botulism.

Other cheeses that wear a protective coating of B. linens are Harz, Muenster, Port du Salut and Tilsiter. Liederkranz is the most heavily protected of all. Whether Dr. Grecz’s unnamed antibiotic can ever be used in human patients is doubtful, though Eli Lilly & Co. is trying to extract enough to test it in animals. Its main use is likely to be in the processing of cheeses and other foods.