Chain was an abrupt, abrasive and acutely sensitive man who fought constantly with Florey over who deserved credit for developing penicillin. One of Florey’s brightest employees was a biochemist, Dr. They decided to unravel the science beneath what Fleming called penicillium’s ”antibacterial action.”Ī petri-dish of penicillin showing its inhibitory effect on some bacteria but not on others. Soon after, Florey and his colleagues assembled in his well-stocked laboratory. This landmark work began in 1938 when Florey, who had long been interested in the ways that bacteria and mold naturally kill each other, came across Fleming’s paper on the penicillium mold while leafing through some back issues of The British Journal of Experimental Pathology. He was a master at extracting research grants from tight-fisted bureaucrats and an absolute wizard at administering a large laboratory filled with talented but quirky scientists. Howard Florey, a professor of pathology who was director of the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology at Oxford University. Mary’s nor the chemistry background to take the next giant steps of isolating the active ingredient of the penicillium mold juice, purifying it, figuring out which germs it was effective against, and how to use it. But I guess that was exactly what I did.”įourteen years later, in March 1942, Anne Miller became the first civilian patient to be successfully treated with penicillin, lying near death at New Haven Hospital in Connecticut, after miscarrying and developing an infection that led to blood poisoning.īut there is much more to this historic sequence of events.Īctually, Fleming had neither the laboratory resources at St. Fleming famously wrote about that red-letter date: “When I woke up just after dawn on September 28, 1928, I certainly didn’t plan to revolutionize all medicine by discovering the world’s first antibiotic, or bacteria killer. His conclusions turned out to be phenomenal: there was some factor in the Penicillium mold that not only inhibited the growth of the bacteria but, more important, might be harnessed to combat infectious diseases.Īs Dr. It took Fleming a few more weeks to grow enough of the persnickety mold so that he was able to confirm his findings. Sir Alexander Fleming (1881 – 1955), studying a test tube culture with a hand lens.
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