Penicillin

Penicillin: A Fortunate Accident.

In September 1928 Alexander Fleming, a young physician at Saint Mary's Hospital in London, noticed an unusual finding on the culture plate he was about to discard. Several weeks earlier he had streaked the culture plate with staphylococci. A contaminant mold was growing near one edge of the plate. The unusual thing was that something was coming from the mold that was actually destroying the disease-causing bacteria in the vicinity. Fleming's colleague, Dr. C. J. La Touche, identified the mold as penicillium notatum. A derivative of the mold, which Fleming named penicillin, would become the first effective antibiotic.

Effectiveness.

Later experiments demonstrated that the mold must have been on the plate before the staphylococci rather than following it, because penicillin was effective against the organism only in the stage of active division. It had little effect on mature...

[The entire page is 743 words long]

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