You may owe your life to penicillin -- even if you yourself have never had a life-threatening infection. Your father may have been treated with it. Or your grandmother. This miracle drug has saved millions from dying of common infections that often proved lethal just a few decades ago.

In the early twentieth century, 140,000 Americans die annually from tuberculosis; pellagra is well on its way to becoming one of the most devastating epidemics in US history, and rabies is always fatal. Infectious disease is so ruthless that the population averages little more than forty-five years of age. By the end of the century, unprecedented advances in medical science and the institution of public health measures are largely responsible for adding decades to life expectancy. We are the lucky inheritors of a century's worth of astounding medical achievement.

Premiering on PBS Sunday, January 11, 1998 at 8pm ET (check local listings), "Matters of Life and Death," the first program in A Science Odyssey's landmark five-part series, explores the science and the struggle behind many of the twentieth century's most dramatic medical experiments and discoveries.

In these hundred years the medical profession learns to rely on the mysterious technique of X-ray analysis; to break previously forbidden surgical barriers; to seek remedies for some diseases at the very core of our genetic being. Ours is also a century that sees an old disease, diabetes, alleviated by ingeniously derived insulin -- while new pathogens, like the cruelly elusive AIDS virus, challenge all our scientific knowledge.

"Matters of Life and Death" tracks these and many other of the century's enormous strides forward in human knowledge: from the recognition that the deadly bubonic plague, which strikes San Francisco in 1900 and 1906, is caused by a bacterium -- and, amazingly, is spread by rats infested with disease-carrying fleas; to Joseph Goldberger's equally shocking revelation that pellagra, a baffling and devastating illness, is a plague of a different sort -- one caused not by bacteria, but by poor diet. When Goldberger declares a link between the disease and people whose jobs don't pay enough to allow them to eat well, his sound scientific reasoning is perceived by many as merely social criticism. Thousands die unnecessarily as pride, politics, and public opinion delay a cure for almost a decade.

"Matters of Life and Death" also reveals how medical advances and failures are often profoundly linked to the personalities and "never-say-die" spirit of the scientists and physicians behind them, the attitudes of the wider society, the agendas of the medical community at large, and even world events.

When Alexander Fleming stumbles on penicillin in 1929, he abandons further study as the discovery does not seem vital to his principal research goals. But a decade later, on the battlefields of World War II, the horrifying numbers of wounded and dying soldiers drive desperate scientists to find better ways of dealing with deadly infections. Researchers Howard Florey and Ernst Chain chance upon Fleming's work -- and, with the assistance of US government agencies and powerful American drug companies, Florey produces the antibiotic that saves millions of lives. Never before has a single drug done so much.

"Matters of Life and Death" also takes to the operating room, where forty years ago pioneering heart surgeons pack patients in ice to induce hypothermia, slowing the heart and body functions and gaining a few more precious minutes to operate. The mid-century development of the heart-lung machine enables surgeons to accomplish virtually all possible repairs -- a breakthrough that, in 1967, leads Christiaan Barnard, a South African surgeon, to perform the world's first heart transplant. But it takes years of frustrating trial and failure to improve transplant surgery's success rate and, ultimately, the fortuitous discovery of cyclosporin, a powerful immunosuppressant drug, to allow surgeons to conquer the immune barrier so that one human body can accept a life-giving organ from another.

Chance, ambition, insight, cooperation, compassion, cost -- the odyssey of medical discovery in our century is an engrossing, complex narrative that focuses on the quest for knowledge and fame, and the desire to prevent human suffering. It is also the story of human achievement against great odds -- and of the crushing consequences of failure; of science yielding incalculable benefits as well as tragedy and disappointment; and of society and its institutions achieving sweeping changes in treatment, but, ironically, left to struggle with the consequences of increased life expectancies and a host of troubling new questions: How far are we willing to go to prolong life? Who will benefit from these big-ticket medical breakthroughs -- and at what price?

"Matters of Life and Death" pursues researchers and clinicians to the very edge of the century, mapping the ever-expanding boundaries of medical science, and society's thoroughly modern charge: to weigh miraculous possibilities against new social and psychological burdens -- and, finally, to make choices that once were left only to fate.

125 Western Ave Boston, MA 02134 A production of WGBH Boston 617.492.2777 www.pbs.org

Major funding is provided by the National Science Foundation.

Corporate sponsorship is provided by IBM. IBM is a registered trademark of IBM Corporation.

Additional funding comes from public television viewres, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, The Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, Carnegie Corporation of New York, and Becton Dickinson and Company.