Penicillin
Penicilina
- Date
- 1928–1943 · confidence high
- Place
- London (St Mary's Hospital, Paddington), England
- Credited to
- Alexander Fleming (discovery, 1928); Howard Florey, Ernst Chain and Norman Heatley (Oxford, purification, 1940); Peoria (USDA) and Pfizer (mass production, 1943)
- People
- 👤 Alexander Fleming1881–1955
- Field
- Life & health
What it is
First antibiotic, produced by the Penicillium mould; purified at Oxford and mass-produced by deep fermentation for D-Day. It changed humanity's relationship with infection.
Ernest Duchesne (Lyon, 1897) had described the antibacterial effect of Penicillium in his thesis.
What it led to
- The antibiotic era and the fall in mortality from infection
- The fermentation-based biotechnology industry
- Bacterial resistance
Built on
- Petri dish1887
- Salvarsan (arsphenamine)1909–1910
- Industrial citric acid by fermentation (Currie)1917-1919
- Pasteur and Koch's germ theory
- observations of microbial antagonism (Tyndall, Duchesne 1897)
- lysozyme (Fleming, 1922)
Made possible
- Streptomycin1943
- Antibiotic resistance and horizontal gene transfer1940-1961
- Semi-synthetic antibiotics
- Industrial fermentation
- beta-lactam antibiotics