Who discovered penicillin?
Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin in 1928 in London, when he noticed that a mold growing on a bacteria dish was killing the bacteria around it.
Fleming, a Scottish scientist working at St Mary's Hospital, returned from a vacation to find that one of his dishes of Staphylococcus bacteria had been contaminated by a mold, Penicillium. Around the mold, the bacteria had died. He named the active substance penicillin and published his findings in 1929.
Fleming could not produce penicillin in useful amounts. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, Howard Florey, Ernst Chain and their team at the University of Oxford purified it and proved it could cure infections. During World War II, factories in the United States mass-produced it, saving many soldiers' lives.
The Nobel Prize
Fleming, Florey and Chain shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1945. Penicillin became the first widely used antibiotic and began a new era in medicine.
Did You Know?
Fleming warned in 1945 that misusing penicillin could make bacteria resistant to it. Antibiotic resistance is now one of the biggest challenges in modern medicine.