Penicillin – the story of a medicine ‘Millions of people all over the world are alive and well because penicillin – and other antibiotics like it – are so good at killing bacteria.’ ‘But even when a chemical that kills bacteria had been discovered, it wasn’t easy to turn it into a medicine for us to take…’

In 1928 the scientist Alexander Fleming was growing lots of bacteria on special plates covered in jelly. The bacteria feed on the jelly and grow to cover the whole plate. One day Alexander noticed that mould had grown on some of his plates, as if they were slices of bread! This was a stroke of luck which has saved millions of lives.

Fleming noticed something. Although lots of bacteria were growing on his plates, there was a clear ring in the jelly around some of the spots of mould. Something had killed the bacteria that was covering the jelly! Fleming called the bacteria- killing chemical penicillin. But he just couldn’t get enough penicillin out of the mould to use it. By 1934 he gave up and went on to something different!

They managed to get enough penicillin to try it out on mice infected with bacteria. The mice which were given penicillin got better, but the other mice died Howard Florey and Ernst Chain were scientists working at Oxford University. In 1938 they decided to look at penicillin.

By 1941 World War II was raging. Penicillin could save the lives of thousands of wounded soldiers – but the scientists just couldn’t make enough of it. Even Florey and Chain struggled to get enough penicillin to treat people with. Their first patient started to get better – but the penicillin ran out and he died. Then they tried the new medicine on a 15 year old boy who had an infection after an operation. He was completely cured.

In Britain all the factories were busy with the war effort. But Howard Florey knew lots of people in America, so the scientists took their mould to the United States. Some of the big US chemical companies helped them make penicillin on a big scale.

‘Chain, Fleming and Florey all got a Nobel Prize for their work.’ ‘And they deserved it too. Without penicillin, millions more soldiers would have died in the war – and millions more people afterwards - from infectious diseases.’ go back to the menu