Penicillin

The 1945 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine recognised three men whose efforts brought about the production of the world’s first antibiotic, namely penicillin. This was first used during World War 2 and it saved the lives of thousands of wounded soldiers by attacking the cell structure of bacteria.

The first of the three men was Sir Alexander Fleming (1881-1955), who was born in Ayrshire. In his research work at St Mary’s Hospital in London, he had accidentally left some petri dishes out during a short absence in 1928 and returned to find a mould around which there were no bacteria.

Although he continued to work on his discovery and published a paper about it, there was not much interest until émigrés Sir Howard Walter Florey (1898-1968) and Sir Ernst Boris Chain (1906-79), working together at Oxford University, found that it could be used to combat disease. This was in the early 1940s and since then, many other antibiotics have been developed to meet high demand. However, bacteria can adapt and there are now public information campaigns warning of over-use.

(Top image of portrait of Sir Alexander Fleming: jenikirbyhistory.getarchive.net / Public domain)