DEFENDING THE BODY FROM WITHIN

FLEMING - ANTIBIOTICS

Everywhere I go people want to thank me for saving their lives. I really don't know why... . Nature created penicillin, I only found it.
- Alexander Fleming, c. 1955

By his own telling, Alexander Fleming's discovery of the remarkable antibacterial powers of Penicillium notatum was accidental — a now classic example of scientific serendipity. In 1928, Fleming was studying and culturing staphylococcus, a bacteria responsible for septicemia and other infections. Returning from a vacation, he found that a mold had grown on one of his cultures. Looking more closely, he discovered that the active mold seemed to be killing off any bacteria that came in contact with it. The mold was a strain of the fungus P. notatum.

Left: Fleming in his laboratory, at St. Mary's Hospital in London.

Right: Penicillin ampule.

In the 1940s, several scientists working individually and together took Fleming's discovery to the next step by developing methods for isolating the active ingredient from the mold and producing it in large enough quantities to make a marketable drug feasible. Penicillin, as the new drug was called, gained fame as a 20th-century "miracle drug." The word antibiotic was coined to refer to a class of drugs derived from mold or bacteria that inhibit the growth of other organisms.

While antibiotics have proven effective against bacterial infection, they are virtually useless against viruses, since antibiotics generally target physiological structures and processes that viruses lack.

Left: Poster "penicillin cures gonorrhea in 4 hours."

Right: Fleming with Anne Schaefe Miller, the first patient whose life was saved with penicillin, 1942.

Makeshift culture vessel (made from a biscuit tin) for the large-scale, non commercial production of penicillin.