The Journey from “Mold” to “Cure”
Though Fleming’s discovery was published, little attention was paid to him until ten years later by an Australian doctor named Howard Florey (of the University of Oxford). Florey believed that there was an antibiotic stronger than Sulfa drugs, so he was quite interested in Fleming’s finds.
Obtaining strains of penicillium notatum from Fleming (which he had kept alive from the original strain), he enlisted the help of a chemist by the name of Ernst Chain. The two then went about creating a purified form of penicillin. Months later, their hard work paid off; they then had enough purified penicillin to run tests on mice. Amazing success was found in the mice that they had given penicillin.
From the mice, they eventually advanced on to a human test. They tested the
penicillin out on a forty-three year old policeman who had a bad case of blood
poisoning. Within the twenty-four hours of giving the man the penicillin, he
showed remarkable recovery and continued to grow healthier until they ran out of
penicillin. Before they could get him a new supply, he grew worse and finally
died.
They had to then figure out a way of manufacturing large supplies of penicillin at a time. Florey decided to enlist help from America in the manufacturing process. The United States government put millions of dollars into the plan and got five of the biggest American companies in on the production. Soon, they had hundreds of people working on “project penicillin” (which is what I call it).
Just years before,
Florey only had a small team and few ways of creating penicillin. Now, with the
help of many American scientists, chemists, etc. working on
project penicillin,
they could help save millions of lives. They didn’t know that in 1959,
productions could be bigger than ever because they then began testing
synthetically made penicillin (this meant get penicillin directly from chemicals
instead of mold).