Penicillin
A contaminated petri dish leads to the first drug that reliably cures bacterial infection.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 17 years
- Known to
- ± 1 year
- Era
- Industrial, Holocene
Fleming notices in 1928 that a mould has killed staphylococci around it, publishes, and largely moves on. Florey, Chain and Heatley at Oxford turn it into a usable drug from 1939 through difficult purification work, and American industrial fermentation scales it for the invasion of Europe. Before antibiotics a scratch could kill. Life expectancy, surgery and childbirth are all transformed, and resistance begins appearing almost immediately.