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The Discovery of Penicillin. In 1928, thanks to a lucky accident, Fleming made the most important discovery of his life. He was using Staphylococcus bacteria when he noticed that the bacteria could not survive if a mold, called Penicillium notatum, contaminated the sample.
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Discovery of Penicillin . Alexander Fleming achieved an epochal milestone in August 1928 that would revolutionize medicine. Following a prolonged vacation with his wife and son, he returned to his laboratory on September 3 to find a cluster of Petri dishes he had left on his workbench.
(1881–1955). Penicillin was discovered in September 1928. It has saved millions of lives by stopping the growth of the bacteria that are responsible for blood poisoning and many other once fatal diseases. This miracle drug was one of the first antibiotics.
- Tiny Foes and Friends
- An Accident Waiting to Happen…
- How Does Penicillin Work?
- The Resistance Is Rising…
- Conclusion
- Conflict of Interest
Bacteria are very important for us. They live on us and inside us, and we use them to obtain certain nutrients from food, among many other things (Read more in this Young Minds article; We Are Never Alone: Living with the Human Microbiota ). But some bacteria, called pathogens, can also cause infections and some pathogens can be very dangerous. Pat...
On the morning of Monday, September 3, 1928, Fleming was coming back from a family holiday . Before he went on holiday, Fleming was working with a very common pathogen: Staphylococcus aureus. Fleming left some glass Petri dishes on his lab bench, with these bacteria growing on the surface of solid medium. Usually, these plates would be sterilized b...
The way that penicillin works to inhibit bacterial growth was not understood until 1980. Now we know that penicillin inhibits the activity of certain enzymes in bacteria called penicillin-binding proteins (PBPs), which are essential for most bacteria to create a wall that covers their cells. Without that wall, bacterial cells are much more exposed ...
What Fleming also predicted during his speech accepting the Nobel Prize in 1945 was that bacteria may become resistant to antibiotics. This is just happening due to evolution, because bacteria can adapt very quickly to overcome any hurdle limiting their growth. The changes that help bacteria to adapt may be driven by random mutations in their DNA, ...
The discovery of penicillin was only possible in a laboratory where contaminations were common. Chance certainly played a role in the discovery of the first antibiotic, but the training and laboratory practice of Fleming were essential for him to identify one of the most important drugs in human history. Unfortunately, due to antibiotic resistance,...
The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
Alexander Fleming’s Discovery of Penicillin. Penicillin Research at Oxford University. Penicillin Production in the United States during WWII. Increasing the Yield of Penicillin. U.S. Pharmaceutical Companies Support Production. Scaling-up Production. Penicillin, WWII and Commercial Production. Further Reading.
