Question: how did Alex Fleming discover antibiotics?

Angela Stokes answered on 18 Nov 2014:

Hi the wheeler dealer

Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin (a type of antibiotic) very much by accident.

He had been working on some experiments in his laboratory in 1926. and had cleared his bench before going on holiday and had put some dishes in Lysol with the intention of killing the bugs on them so they could be reused. There were a lot of dishes and some did not get submerged.

When he returned, Fleming picked up one of the non-submerged dishes and noticed something very strange about it. While he had been away, a mold had grown on the dish which appeared to have killed the Staphylococcus aureus that had been growing in the dish before he left.

After several weeks growing more mold and talking with mold experts Fleming determined the mold to be a Penicillium mold which had come from the laboratory below. Fleming then called the active antibacterial agent in the mold, penicillin.

Fleming ran numerous experiments and determined it had an effect on other harmful bacteria and yet was not toxic. Not being a chemist, Fleming was unable to isolate the active antibacterial element, penicillin, so he wrote up his experiment in 1929 but there was very little scientific interest at that time.

It took until 1940 when the second world war was ongoing before penicillin was to become important again. Howard Florey and Ernst Chain were working at Oxford University researching projects in bacteriology that could be continued using chemistry techniques and began working with penicillin. They were able to produce a powder that kept its antibacterial power and which was safe in humans.

So Fleming discovered penicillin, but Florey and Chain made it into a medicinal product. All three of them were awarded the 1945 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, but Fleming is still credited for discovering penicillin.