In 1938, Howard Florey (1898-1968) and Ernst Chain (1906-1979), two pathologists working at the University of Oxford, read a paper published nine years earlier about a substance called penicillin. Its author, Alexander Fleming, recounted how spores of the mold Penicillium notatum had entered his bacterial culture dishes and killed some of the bacteria.
Florey and Chain recognized the significance of Fleming's observation and obtained a culture of the original mold. Initially they encountered difficulties in obtaining enough penicillin, but Norman Heatley (1911-2004), a biochemist on the team, devised ways of isolating penicillin without destroying it. Monitoring the extracted penicillin on mice infected with bacteria, they found animals treated with penicillin survived, while untreated animals died.
With World War II now underway, the group recognized penicillin's enormous potential to treat war wounds. In 1941 Heatley traveled to the United States to start the commercial production of penicillin. Working with a team at Northern Regional Research Laboratory, Peoria, Illinois, he increased the yield of penicillin thirty-four times by adding a by-product of cornstarch and lactose to the fermentation. By D-day in June 1944 enough penicillin was available to allow unlimited treatment of Allied troops.
In 1945 Florey Chain, and Fleming shared the Nobel Prize. In his Nobel address, Fleming presciently predicted the problem of antibiotic resistance, where bacteria would develop resistance to penicillin and other antibiotics through their overuse.
