On October 24, 1945, Alexander Fleming received the Nobel Prize in Medicine for the discovery of penicillin. A discovery that marked a before and after in medicine by being the starting signal for the development of antibiotics.
Not everyone knows that the discovery of penicillin occurred by chance. It was one of those “lucky accidents” that dot the history of Science. The story is still curious.
Alexander Fleming was Professor of Bacteriology at St. Mary’s Hospital in London during 1928. Perhaps during that summer Dr. Fleming was in a special hurry to go on vacation; The fact is that he left without thoroughly cleaning the laboratory.
How was penicillin discovered
Upon returning from a few well-deserved days of rest, Fleming began to clean the dirty Petri dishes. In those Petri dishes they had been telemarketing list experimenting with bacteria, specifically Staphylococcus aureus, and Fleming observed something strange in one of them: there was mold growth, and around it a halo free of bacteria. That mold released a substance capable of inhibiting bacterial growth.
Fleming soon isolated the fungus and tested its effectiveness against several types of bacteria. Charles Tom identified the fungus as belonging to the species Penicilliumnotatum and Fleming named the substance penicillin .
In 1929 Fleming published his findings on penicillin. Despite the potential importance of the news, the discovery went somewhat unnoticed. It was not until 1943 that penicillin underwent clinical trials. Its first large-scale use was during World War II to treat wounded soldiers on D-Day.
The future of antibiotics
It was not until 1948 that Andrew J. Moyer, one of the scientists responsible for this progress, obtained a patent for a method of mass production of penicillin.
In 1945, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded jointly to Sir Alexander Fleming, Ernst Boris Chain and Sir Howard Walter Florey, “for the discovery of penicillin and its curative effect on various infectious diseases.”
One of the greatest challenges of modern Science is to face the loss of effectiveness of antibiotics. The misuse of antibiotics has Book Your List caused many bacteria to develop resistance that is increasingly difficult to overcome.
That is why researchers are constantly looking for new, more effective antibiotics, while warning about the need to alert the population to make better use of these medications.
