SEPTEMBER 28, 1928
Alexander Fleming, a farmer’s son from Ayrshire, was a researcher working at St Mary’s Hospital Medical School in Paddington, London, when he discovered penicillin, the world’s first antibiotic, by accident.
Returning from holiday, Fleming removed the tops from some old petri dishes and noticed that the bacteria he had grown were being killed by a mould, which he later identified as penicillin.
However, Fleming did not have the money or the facilities to continue his research.
In the late 1930s two Oxford scientists, Ernst Chain and Howard Florey, took up the challenge.
The problem was in producing enough penicillin. Thousands of milk bottles produced only enough penicillin to treat four mice – though the mice recovered. In 1941, it was tested on a human and, though he died when the penicillin ran out, it was obvious that it was effective.
By 1943, penicillin was being mass produced, as it still is today.
Fleming was later to say of his discovery: “One sometimes finds, what one is not looking for. When I woke up just after dawn on
September 28, 1928, I certainly didn’t plan to revolutionise all medicine by discovering the world’s first antibiotic, or bacteria killer. But I suppose that was exactly what I did.”
Fleming shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1945 with
Florey and Chain.