Discoveries
Penicillin
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Penicillin is the first widely used antibiotic, produced by Penicillium mold. Alexander Fleming observed in 1928 that a stray mold contaminating a bacterial culture plate inhibited nearby bacterial growth, but its development into a usable drug required the later work of Howard Florey and Ernst Chain, whose Oxford team purified and tested it in the early 1940s, enabling large-scale wartime production. This atlas records what the historical record supports and is not medical advice.
Facts
Disputed
DiscovererAlexander Flemings 1928 observation is credited as the discovery, but Howard Florey and Ernst Chains Oxford team turned it into a usable medicine in the early 1940s and share the 1945 Nobel Prize with Fleming for the achievement. 3 Fleming is credited with the initial 1928 observation; Florey and Chain are credited, alongside Fleming, with making it a practical drug, and all three shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1945. Discovery Year Discovery Date Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
Alexander Fleming's 1928 discovery of penicillin is the first antibiotic effective against bacterial infection generally.
Sources
Dissenting Readings (1 dissenting reading)
Discoverer
Historians of science, and Oxford University itself, have argued that Norman Heatley, the biochemist whose vacuum extraction and assay techniques made penicillin production practical, was unjustly excluded from the 1945 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, which recognized only Fleming, Florey and Chain. Oxford awarded Heatley an honorary Doctor of Medicine in 1990, the first in the university's eight hundred year history, explicitly to correct the omission.
A dissenting reading, from Historians of science crediting Norman HeatleyEncyclopaedia Britannica, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.
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