History of Science: Alexander Fleming wakes up to an interesting mold in his Petri dish and accidentally discovers the first antibiotic – September 28, 1928

On September 28, 1928, Alexander Fleming woke up, checked experiments investigating the growth of bacteria, and accidentally discovered the world’s first antibiotic.

Scottish physicists and microbiologists were conducting experiments in a narrow 12-square-foot room (1 square meter) of a turret in St. Mary’s Hospital in London. Famous, violent scientists will cultivate bacteria from infected hospital patients. He left those cultures for a few weeks until 40-50 plates were stuffed onto the bench. He then inspected each plate to see if anything interesting had grown.

The discovery of penicillin occurred when Fleming returned from a two-week break. He saw a dish of Staphylococcus aureus cultured from the infected wound. According to his assistant Allison’s description, on one of the plates, Fleming noticed that a patch of green mold crossed with a golden bacterial colony. Near the green patch, the bacteria were translucent, colourless and dead. The bacteria-killed substances form the basis for the first antibiotics, but the conditions were not created until 1941.

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“When I woke up shortly after dawn on September 28, 1928, I certainly had no intention of revolutionizing all medicines by discovering the world’s first antibiotic, or bacterial killer,” Fleming later said. “But I think that was exactly what I did.”

Fleming determined that the “type juice” came from a fungal species that was ultimately identified as penicillium. He met with almost complete indifference when he explained his discoveries to fellow doctors at next year’s meeting. The discovery suffered for ten years, as quarantining the elusive “mold juice” proved to be challenging, Alison wrote in a personal flashback.

Then, in 1939, scientists Howard Florey and Ernstchane became interested in the material. They created a research team and together with scientists such as Margaret Jennings, Edward Abraham and Norman Heatley, isolated penicillin from mold, tested it, and used yellow powdered substances to cure a handful of patients. However, the compounds were still relatively impure.

In 1942, Fleming was treating a young patient with meningitis. He discovers that the powder killed a patient’s bacterial infection, and he calls Flori and Chain for some of their stashes, despite it being unpurified. After Fleming injected the boy’s spinal cord, the patient recovered.

After this miraculous recovery, Fleming was convinced that he needed to mass-produce penicillin. He pitched it to the government, and soon there was a joint effort between the US and the UK, mass-producing the material. By 1945, the first antibiotics were widely available.

Fleming, Florey and Chain were awarded the 1945 Nobel Prize in Medicine for their work on the discovery, isolation and production of penicillin. In 1964, Dorothy Hodgkin won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry to unravel its crystal structure, helping chemists design later antibiotics.

Since its discovery, penicillin has saved 500 million lives and, together with its derivatives, is estimated to be the mainstay in treating countless diseases such as ear infections, streptococcal throat and urinary tract infections.

Penicillin also led to the development of hundreds of different antibiotics. However, the widespread use and misuse of these mysterious drugs means that many bacterial strains have evolved resistance to common antibiotics, including penicillin. In the weapons race with the Superbug, scientists are now finding a whole new way to combat bacteria, from leveraging the power of bacteria to attack bacteria, to designing new drugs using the gene editing tool CRISPR.