THE WORLD ATLAS

Science · 1928–1945

Penicillin and the age of antibiotics

St Mary's Hospital, Paddington, London (England)

In September 1928 the Scottish doctor Alexander Fleming noticed at St Mary's Hospital in London that a Penicillium mould contaminating one of his bacterial cultures had killed the bacteria around it; he called the substance penicillin, but could not purify it. In 1940 a team at the University of Oxford led by Howard Florey and Ernst Chain made concentrated penicillin and showed it cured infections, and from 1941 US laboratories and drug companies worked out how to mass-produce it, making 2.3 million doses in time for the D-Day landings in June 1944.

Fleming, Florey and Chain shared the 1945 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

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Why it mattered

Penicillin was one of the first medicines that could reliably cure deadly bacterial infections such as those caused by staphylococci and streptococci; in the Second World War it greatly cut deaths and amputations from infected wounds, and after 1945 it became widely available and opened the way to many more antibiotics, making common infections, surgery and childbirth far safer. Overuse has since bred resistant bacteria, which Fleming warned of in 1945: antimicrobial resistance was directly blamed for 1.27 million deaths in 2019.

Elsewhere

The best mould for mass production came from a mouldy cantaloupe melon bought in a market in Peoria, Illinois, in 1943, and yielded six times as much penicillin as Fleming's strain. Florey chose not to patent penicillin, having been advised that doing so would be unethical.

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