How was penicillin discovered?

Penicillin had been discovered several times, but the first person to publish an article about its potential was Alexander Fleming. He discovered it by accident when he was washing up old petri dishes and noticed that bacteria had not grown around the penicillium mould.

How was penicillin developed into a medicine?

Nothing happened for several years until Howard Florey and Ernst Chain read Fleming’s article and investigated further. They then spent years developing the idea into a drug.

Key Events:

1940 - experiment on mice proved that the mould worked as a medicine in a living creature.

1941 - experiment on a policeman, Albert Alexander. They ran out of penicillin and so he died, but it proved the drug’s potential.

1944 - penicillin was mass produced with enough doses to treat the D Day casualties in World War II. By 1945 250,000 soldiers had been treated.

Factors that enabled the development of penicillin:

Chance - that Fleming noticed the mould when washing up.
Individual genius - of Fleming (as Pasteur said, "chance favours the mind that is prepared.") Also of Florey and Chain.
Teamwork - modern medical research needs teams to conduct experiments.
War - led to funding in the hope that the drug could be used to treat casualties.
Government - at first the UK government only gave £25 as resources were needed for the war. Florey then lobbied the US government who gave $80m to mass-produce the drug.
Industry - industrial chemists helped mass-produce the drug, including the modern pharmaceutical company Pfizer.

Significance:

Penicillin was the first antibiotic. It possibly prevented 15% of UK and US WWII casualties from dying. This group of drugs means that most infectious diseases can now be cured, saving millions of lives every year. New antibiotics have been discovered since, such as streptomycin in 1944. Overuse of antibiotics in medicine and in farming, however, is leading to some "superbugs" that are becoming resistant to antibiotics.

GCSE Health and the People AQA

Penicillin - the first antibiotic