Penicillin, the first antibiotic, was discovered by accident
A mould drifting onto a forgotten culture plate opened the antibiotic age — and won a Nobel Prize.
In 1928, bacteriologist Alexander Fleming returned from holiday to find a culture of Staphylococcus bacteria contaminated by a stray mould. Around the mould, the bacteria had been killed, leaving a clear ring. He identified the intruder as a Penicillium mould and named the substance it produced penicillin — the first true antibiotic.
Fleming couldn’t purify or stabilise it, and his finding sat largely unused for over a decade. The breakthrough came from an Oxford team led by Howard Florey and Ernst Chain, who turned penicillin into a mass-produced drug that saved countless lives during the Second World War.
In 1945 the three men shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine “for the discovery of penicillin and its curative effect in various infectious diseases.” A chance contamination had launched modern antibiotic medicine.
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