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—— ON THIS DAY ——
SEPTEMBER 28, 1928
London, England
98 years ago
Alexander Fleming's observation of the antibacterial effect of Penicillium mould on September 28, 1928, at St Mary's Hospital in London, the beginning of the antibiotic era.
On September 28, 1928, Alexander Fleming returned to his cramped laboratory at St Mary's Hospital in Paddington, London, after a holiday in Scotland and began sorting through a stack of petri dishes he had left behind. The dishes had been seeded with staphylococcus bacteria. One of them was contaminated with a blue-green mould, and around the mould there was a clear zone where no bacteria had grown. Fleming showed it to a colleague and said something to the effect that it was odd.
Contamination was an everyday nuisance in a bacteriology lab, and the ordinary response was to discard the dish. Fleming kept it, cultured the mould, identified it as a species of Penicillium, and established that the substance it produced, which he called penicillin, killed a range of dangerous bacteria including those responsible for scarlet fever, pneumonia, meningitis, and diphtheria, while leaving human white blood cells unharmed. He published in 1929.
—— MARQUEE EVENT ——
Antibiotics, the class of drugs that penicillin opened, which transformed the treatment of infection and made modern surgery, childbirth, and cancer therapy survivable.
The paper attracted almost no attention. Fleming was not a chemist, and penicillin was unstable and present in tiny quantities in the mould broth. He and his assistants could not purify enough of it to test properly on patients, and after several years of frustration he largely set the work aside. For roughly a decade, the most important therapeutic discovery of the century sat in the literature doing nothing.
It was revived at Oxford in 1939 by Howard Florey, an Australian pathologist, and Ernst Chain, a German-born biochemist who had fled the Nazis, working with a team that included Norman Heatley. Heatley devised the methods to grow and extract the drug in usable quantities, improvising equipment from bedpans, milk churns, and bookshelves. In May 1940 the team showed that penicillin protected mice from lethal doses of streptococci. The first human trial, on a policeman with a severe infection, produced dramatic improvement before the supply ran out and the patient died.
Wartime Britain could not manufacture it at scale under bombardment, so Florey and Heatley took the work to the United States, where a laboratory in Peoria, Illinois, found that corn steep liquor dramatically raised yields, and where a more productive mould strain was found on a supermarket cantaloupe. American pharmaceutical companies scaled up production in time for the Normandy landings in 1944. Fleming, Florey, and Chain shared the Nobel Prize in 1945. In his Nobel lecture Fleming warned that bacteria could be made resistant to penicillin by exposing them to insufficient doses, a prediction that has become one of the defining public health problems of the present century.
—— WHY THIS MATTERS ——
It began the antibiotic era and made modern medicine possible. Before penicillin, a scratch could kill and routine surgery carried an enormous risk of fatal infection. Antibiotics underpin surgery, childbirth, transplantation, and cancer treatment as they are practised today.
Discovery and development are not the same thing. Fleming observed the effect in 1928 and could not make it into a drug. It took Florey, Chain, Heatley, and American industrial chemistry a decade later to turn an observation into a medicine, a lesson in how science actually reaches patients.
Fleming warned about resistance from the start. In his Nobel lecture he described exactly how misuse would breed resistant bacteria. Antimicrobial resistance is now among the most serious long-term threats to global health, and the warning is eighty years old.
—— THE TAKEAWAY ——
Alexander Fleming came back from holiday on September 28, 1928, to a dish of bacteria spoiled by mould, and noticed the bacteria had died around it. He could not purify the stuff and gave up. Others did it a decade later, in time for the war, and the man who found it spent his Nobel lecture warning how easily it could be squandered.
—— QUOTE OF THE DAY ——
“When I woke up just after dawn, I certainly didn't plan to revolutionize all medicine.”
— Alexander Fleming, recalling the morning of September 28, 1928
—— OUR QUIZ OF THE DAY ——
How much do you know about Fleming's discovery of penicillin, why it sat unused for a decade, the Oxford team that developed it, and the warning he gave about resistance?
