The Miracle of Penecillin: Credit where credit is due

In WW2, Hitler’s forces are said to have killed around sixty million people.  Penicillin is believed to have saved a staggering eighty million.  Produced by Penicillium fungi, its discovery by Alexander Flemming is considered one of the greatest moments of all time.  Yet it is often the way that scientific discovery is not the product of a single moment, but the fruit of many years of research.  The story of penicillin is no exception to this.

Flemming was the first to recognise penicillin’s potential but he was not the first to discover its antibacterial effects. It was the Irish physicist John Tyndall in 1875.  Yet, Flemming still had little idea of how to produce enough penicillin to benefit the population. Enter: biochemist Ernst Chain and pathologist, Howard Florey, two of the biggest names behind penicillin – yet two of the least acclaimed. Most have heard of Flemming – but can you say you have ever heard of Chain and Florey?  So dedicated were they in developing penicillin that in the heat of the war they even took to smearing Penicillium spores on the insides of their jackets so they might escape and carry on the work elsewhere in the event of a Nazi invasion.

Alongside biochemist Norman Heatley, Chain and Florey eventually isolated enough of the drug to begin experiments in mice-with great success.  They even discovered its ability to impede bacterial growth – the mechanism behind the magic! The next step was to test it on a human patient – Mr Albert Alexander, suffering multiple infections from something as trivial as a thorn and on the verge of death.

Sadly, Alexander could not be saved.  There simply was not enough penicillin. Only with the aid of two American pharmaceutical companies could Chain and Florey begin mass production in large fermentation tanks.  This was key to the success of the first clinical trial in 1942, which saw to its commercialisation a few years later. However, the trial was not led by any man – but by Florey’s wife. 

Women played just as big a role as men in the story of penicillin, including one Mary Hodgkin.  In 1945, Hodgkin was the first to unveil the structure of penicillin, which fuelled new methods of production and was later awarded the Nobel Prize – along with Chain and Florey.

So when you think of penicillin, spare a thought for its other pioneers besides Flemming – male and female.