Penicillin

I went to London in November 2018 and visited the lab of Alexander Fleming where he discovered penicillin.


St. Mary's hospital (in 1928)

Plaque on one of the St. Mary's Hospital buildings in 2018

Alexander Fleming


Lab/office of Alexander Fleming
The windows were open, a spore of mold came in and settled on an open petri dish that had agar and bacteria inside.



The mold is the big white blob in the petri dish.
The spore of Penicillium notatum mold needed cool temperature to grow, and when Fleming left on his 6 week vacation
it was cool and the mold grew well, the Staphlococcas bacteria needed warm temperatures however.
During his vacation they had a heat wave which allowed the bacteria to grow.
Fleming noticed that the bacteria did not grow well by the mold.
Fleming and his staff tried to collect the secretions but it was difficult.

Fleming wrote it up, and for the next 10 years the mold was used as a lab curiosity
to see which bacteria were or were not affected by the mold.

It was not until 1939 that the hunt was on in earnest to see what it did when injected into humans.

Mr. Brown (left), the curator of the current museum. He wrote a book of all the events.

You can find a booklet using this link:
https://www.acs.org/content/dam/acsorg/education/whatischemistry/landmarks/flemingpenicillin/the-discovery-and-development-of-penicillin-commemorative-booklet.pdf