Alexander Fleming Found Penicillin In 1928, Then Spent A Decade Unable To Use It The most famous accident in the history of medicine happened because a man did not tidy his laboratory before going on holiday. In the late summer of 1928, Alexander Fleming left a stack of Petri dishes growing bacteria in a corner of his cluttered room at St Mary's Hospital in London, and went away for several weeks. When he came back, on or around 3 September, he found that one uncovered dish had been colonised by a blue-green mould, and that in a clear ring around the mould, the bacteria had simply died. It was a discovery that would eventually save more human lives than almost anything else in the twentieth century. What is far less known is that Fleming himself, the man who found it, came within a whisker of letting it slip away entirely. Also Read: The Maharaja Of Banaras Who Drank Only The Ganga's Water Fleming was a Scottish bacteriologist who had served in the First World War and watched men die of infected wounds that no medicine could touch. That experience left him hunting for something that could kill bacteria inside the body without killing the patient. He was a brilliant observer, and famously disorderly, and it was precisely that disorder, the unwashed dishes, the willingness to peer at them rather than discard them, that set the whole story in motion. Where another scientist might have tossed a contaminated plate into the cleaning tray, Fleming looked closely and understood that he was seeing something remarkable. Alexander Fleming’s Messy Laboratory Led To Medicine’s Greatest Bacterial Breakthrough (Picture Credit - Britannica) He identified the mould as a species of Penicillium and named the substance it produced penicillin. He ran tests, confirmed that it destroyed dangerous bacteria, and in 1929 published his findings in a scientific journal. And then he hit a wall he could not climb. The active ingredient was maddeningly unstable and present only in tiny quantities, and Fleming, for all his gifts, was not a chemist. He could not extract it, could not purify it, and could not produce it in anything like the amounts a real medicine would need. He enlisted the help of chemists to try, and they failed too. The substance seemed to be a laboratory curiosity, fascinating and useless in equal measure. This is the part of the story that gets left out of the legend. For most of the 1930s, penicillin went nowhere. Fleming, unable to turn his discovery into a drug, gradually set the work aside and moved on to other research. He never entirely lost faith, and kept sending samples of his mould to any scientist who wrote to ask for one, quietly hoping that someone, somewhere, might succeed where he had not. But the great breakthrough of 1928 sat dormant for more than a decade, a promise nobody could keep. Had matters ended there, Fleming would be a footnote, remembered for a clever observation that led to nothing. Also Read: Sucheta Kripalani: The Woman Who Sang The Nation Awake On The First Independence Day The rescue came from Oxford. In the late 1930s, a team led by the Australian pathologist Howard Florey and the German refugee biochemist Ernst Chain went looking through old scientific papers for antibacterial substances worth pursuing, and came upon Fleming's forgotten article. With a gifted colleague named Norman Heatley devising ingenious ways to grow the mould and coax out its precious extract, they did what Fleming could not. They purified penicillin. In 1940 they tested it on mice infected with a deadly bacterium, and the treated animals lived while the untreated ones died. The war gave the work desperate urgency, and after they carried the effort to the United States, penicillin was finally mass-produced in time to save countless wounded soldiers and, ever since, countless ordinary patients. Howard Florey Injects Penicillin Into A Mouse’s Tail Around 1940 (Picture Credit - Mary Evans Picture Library) In 1945, Fleming, Florey and Chain shared the Nobel Prize in Medicine, and Fleming, gracious to the last, was quick to point out how much luck and how many other hands had been involved. That honesty is the heart of the real story. We like to tell the discovery of penicillin as a single lucky moment, one man, one mould, one flash of genius, because it is a neater and more comforting tale. The truth is better. A discovery is not the same as a cure, and Fleming's genius in seeing what the mould could do was matched, and completed, only years later by the patient, unglamorous brilliance of the people who made it work. The wonder drug that changed the world was not born in that untidy London lab in 1928. It was merely glimpsed there, by a man honest enough to admit he could not finish what he had started, and wise enough to leave the door open for those who could. Seasoned Editor and Author with over a decade of experience in literary journalism, author interviews, and publishing trends. Known for curating impac... Vi