It wasn’t until 1929 when the first an- where penicillin was left off. They were
tibiotic was “invented”. A bacteriologist, able to successfully complete the job
Sir Alexander Fleming was returning to that Sir Alexander had left to his assishis laboratory after taking an extended tants (extracting the “mold juice” from
vacation on September 3rd 1928. He be- Penicillium notatum). So they extracted
gan sorting/tidying through his petri the pure penicillin from the bacteria killdishes that he had left behind. These ing substance that existed in the mold.
petri dishes had contained bacteria that The testing of penicillin took years this
were responsible for sore throats, boils was a result of the outbreak of World War
and abscesses. While observing his 1 and 2 that stalled many laboratory testdishes he realized something very peculi- ing. Manufacturing was moved to the
ar…on one of the dishes a strange mold United States and companies were
had formed. All the bacteria on the petri taken over while penicillin was still in the
dish were still there except around the testing phase. Yet, by 1945 they (Alexanarea the mold was present. It was as if der Fleming, Howard Florey, and Ernst
the mold has secreted some sort of sub- Chain) achieved the Nobel Prize in
stance that completely annihilated the medicine “for
the
FACT
bacteria (“mold juice”). After concen- d i s c o v e r y
the wingspan of a
trated testing he identified it as a rare of penicil- boeing 747 is longer than
the wright brothers first
strain of Penicillium notatum. His assis- lin and its
flight
tants Stuart Craddock and Frederick Ri- curative
dley were given the heavy task of extract- effect
in variing this pure penicillin from the “mold ous in- fectious diseases”.
juice”. They knew that this penicillin
would be able to destroy plenty other Experimental Test
forms of bacteria. Yet the substance
they were extracting at the time proved
very unstable. Sir Alexander was unable
to fully complete his findings...
A decade later it was up too Howard Florey and Ernst chain to pick up
10