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But researchers say this newly discovered compound is structurally and chemically unique from that other mycin and from all other antibiotics—meaning it could launch a whole new class of drugs.

He once remarked, in an oblique reference to the First Violin Concerto, whose inspiration was the poem May Night by Tadeusz Mycin´ski: "Our national music is not the stiffened ghost of the polonaise or mazurka … It is rather the solitary, joyful, carefree song of the nightingale in a fragrant May night in Poland."

The technological lineage of RIC and almost every other second-wave system can be traced back to Mycin, an expert system written at Stanford in the mid- 1970s.

Named for a group of antibiotics, Mycin was the brainchild of a Ph.D. candidate named Edward Shortliffe, who designed it to help physicians diagnose certain infectious diseases and choose appropriate remedies.

After painstakingly interviewing doctors about the process of diagnosis and treatment, Shortliffe and company programmed Mycin with some 500 rules to guide its decisions.