Penicillin: Discovery and Development

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It should be noted that chance and luck played a huge part in the discovery of these antimicrobial drugs. Penicillium notatum mold was grown and studied in one of Fleming’s laboratories. Mold spores are very volatile, and therefore there were many of them in the air of the scientist’s laboratory. Unsurprisingly, when Fleming opened one of his cups of agar-agar sown with staphylococcus, mold spores easily penetrated there. The scientist was then going on vacation for two weeks, and the cup with microbes and spores remained on his desk. Returning to the laboratory, a rested Fleming was surprised to see that the microbes had disappeared around the mold spot (Chan, 2021). The discovery of antibiotics, penicillin, is attributed to Alexander Fleming, but it is necessary to make a few reservations. Even the ancient Egyptians applied moldy bread soaked in water to wounds.

Almost four years before the happy accident in Fleming’s laboratory, the antibacterial properties of mold were described by his friend André Gratia. However, Gratia thought mold does not kill germs directly but only stimulates the body’s immune system and injects it with dead bacteria (How was penicillin developed?, 2021). It is not known what kind of mold the scientist bred and what substance it secreted: Gratia became seriously ill, and when he returned to work, the scientist allegedly could not find old recordings and samples. Like Gratia, Alexander Fleming could not correctly determine which kind of healing mold belonged (Alexander Fleming Discovery and Development of Penicillin, 2021). In addition, the scientist could not isolate a substance that he called penicillin — in experiments, the Scotsman used filtered broth where fungi grew. Nevertheless, Fleming described in detail how this filtrate affects different bacteria, compared mold with other species, and, most importantly — saved samples and sent them out at the first request of colleagues.