13 February: Penicillin

On this date in 1929 Alexander Fleming read a paper about penicillin to the Medical Research Club in London. The response was apathetic. 10 things you might not know about penicillin.

1. Alexander Fleming made his famous discovery on 28 September 1928. That morning, he discovered that a petri dish with a culture of Bacteria in it had been left open and had been contaminated by mould that had blown in through the Window. Luckily, rather than just throw the spoiled culture away, as many others might have done, it occurred to him that this mould might actually be useful, so he began to study it.
2. He may have been a brilliant scientist, but he was less good at communicating his findings. Hence his presentation of his paper the following February met with a lukewarm reaction, and his attempts to persuade others to work with him in developing it met with little success.
3. One of the first people to be treated using penicillin, almost exactly 12 years after Fleming's presentation to the Medical Research Club, was a policeman named Albert Alexander, who had a severe face infection. The story goes that he contracted it because he got scratched in the mouth with a thorn while pruning his Roses. There's no evidence of the truth of this story, though, and it's more likely the infection was from injuries her received during a bomb raid during the second world war. However, there wasn't enough of the drug and so although Alexander's condition began to improve, after it ran out, he died, in spite of efforts to extract and recycle penicillin from his urine.
4. The following year, a woman called Anne Miller was successfully treated for an infection after a miscarriage.
5. Even so penicillin wasn't available to the general public in the UK until 1946, although there was a race in America to industrialise production so there would be sufficient available to treat Allied troops who were injured during the planned invasion of Europe on D-Day.
6. How does Penicillin work? In a nutshell, it blocks the chemicals that help hold bacterial cell walls together, so they let in water and burst.
7. Fleming himself predicted the problem that bacteria might become resistant to penicillin if the drug was over used. He warned of this very issue in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech.
8. About 10% of people report an allergic reaction to penicillin. However, only about 1% of people actually are allergic. Only 0.03% of people suffer life threatening allergic reactions to it.
9. In 1942, Edward Abraham theorised as to what the structure of penicillin might be. In 1945, Dorothy Hodgkin won a Nobel Prize when she confirmed his theory using X-Ray Chrystallography.
10. In 1957, John C. Sheehan of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology figured out how to chemically synythesise penicillin.

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