How Did Alexander Fleming Discover Penicillin

The Discovery of Penicillin Thousands of infectious diseases that existed and caused devastating epidemics before the mid-1900s, are now completely eradicated or almost one-hundred percent preventable. In addition to those thousands of diseases, there was also the risk of infection any time someone acquired so much as a paper cut. If they did not take the time to clean their cut properly and rid it of any bad bacteria, they were in danger. Soldiers wounded on a battlefield, for instance, risked death without the means to properly clean their wounds (which, in a trench, was practically impossible). Before the mid-1900s, hospitals were not a place of healing and hope. They were places of death. People dreaded having to go to the hospital because,
The first person to discover Penicillin was a man named Alexander Fleming, a bacteriologist at St. Mary’s Hospital Medical School (Bud 24). Fleming was looking into an enzyme found in human tears that seemed to have bacterial killing properties, but unfortunately no matter how many experiments he conducted, he didn’t see any more potential within the enzyme (Bud 25). His diligent but seemingly unrewarding work on the enzyme (which by then had the name lysozyme), however, may have proven worthy later, when he discovered Penicillin (Bud 25, Lax 20-22). One day in September 1928, after returning from a month-long holiday, Fleming noticed a dirty dish, and specifically the small growth of mold on that dish, that hadn’t been cleaned before he went on vacation (Bud 25, Lax 17). Under the pretense that the mold may have similar properties as lysozyme, he cultured the mold and, using methods he originally tried on lysozyme, he started to study and experiment with it (Bud 25, Lax 17, 22-23). He quickly developed an active substance that could indeed kill, and prevent, the growth of some bacteria, however not all bacteria (Bud
It was very unstable, so in 1929 he decided to name it Penicillin, published his findings in the British Journal of Experimental Pathology, and had samples of his Penicillin sent all over the world to other scientists (Lax 28, 30). Though Fleming, one of his colleagues, Frederick Ridley, and his longtime assistant Stuart Craddock continued to conduct experiments for the next seven years, they were never able to completely purify their substance (Lax 26-31, Adler 144). For many years, even after Fleming did experiments testing Prontosil against Penicillin, showing that it had much more potential and healing ability, scientists were either uninterested, tried to continue studies but were unable to receive funding, or couldn’t find any way to purify it themselves (Adler