page_title: History of penicillin
section_title: Background
hierarchical_section_title: History of penicillin / The breakthrough discovery / Background
caption_attribution_description: English: Professor Alexander Fleming at work in his laboratory at St Mary's Hospital, London, during the Second World War. Professor Alexander Fleming at work in his laboratory at St Mary's Hospital, London. Fourteen years after his discovery of penicillin, he is still experimenting to investigate the effect of the drug on bacteria.
context_page_description: The history of penicillin follows a number of observations and discoveries of apparent evidence of antibiotic activity in moulds before the modern isolation of the chemical penicillin in 1928. There are anecdotes about ancient societies using moulds to treat infections, and in the following centuries many people observed the inhibition of bacterial growth by various molds. However, it is unknown if the species involved were Penicillium species or if the antimicrobial substances produced were penicillin.
  The Scottish physician Alexander Fleming was the first to suggest that a Penicillium mould must secrete an antibacterial substance, and the first to concentrate the active substance involved, which he named penicillin, the first modern antibiotic, in 1928. During the next twelve years Fleming grew, distributed and studied the original mold, which was determined to be a rare variant of Penicillium notatum.
  Many later scientists were involved in the stabilization and mass production of penicillin and in the search for more productive strains of Penicillium. Important contributors include Ernst Chain, Howard Florey, Norman Heatley and Edward Abraham.
context_section_description: Penicillin was discovered by a Scottish physician Alexander Fleming in 1928. While working at St Mary's Hospital, London, Fleming was investigating the pattern of variation in S. aureus. He was inspired by the discovery of an Irish physician Joseph Warwick Bigger and his two students C.R. Boland and R.A.Q. O’meara at the Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland, in 1927. Bigger and his students found that when they cultured a particular strain of S. aureus, which they designated "Y" that they isolated a year before from a pus of axillary abscess from one individual, the bacterium grew into a variety of strains. They published their discovery as “Variant colonies of Staphylococcus aureus” in The Journal of Pathology and Bacteriology, by concluding:
  We were surprised and rather disturbed to find, on a number of plates, various types of colonies which differed completely from the typical aureus colony. Some of these were quite white; some, either white or of the usual colour were rough on the surface and with crenated margins.
  Fleming and his research scholar Daniel Merlin Pryce pursued this experiment but Price was transferred to another laboratory in the early 1928. After a few months of working alone, Fleming was joined by a new scholar Stuart Craddock. The experiment was successful and Fleming was planning and agreed to write a report in A System of Bacteriology to be published by the Medical Research Council by the end of 1928.
caption: Alexander Fleming in his laboratory at St Mary's Hospital, London
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