Since the early 1900′s, we have been employing a drug called Penicillin to treat bacterial infections in the human body, but something a lot of folks don’t know is that it was discovered fairly by accident by a Scottish scientist named Sir Alexander Fleming in the year 1928.


In his laboratory in St. Mary’s Hospital in London, he discovered that the mold Penicillium notatum had discovered its way into a culture dish of Staphylococcus and was inhibiting its growth.


He thought initially that it could be a excellent disinfectant and noted that it was extremely successful, but was minimally toxic. The significance of his discovery was not truly known at the time and the use of penicillin did not truly start until the 1940′s.


Howard Florey and 3 of his colleagues at Oxford University started to research further into penicillin.


The capacity that it had to kill infectious bacteria was especially interesting, but given that the country was in the middle of World War II, it was unable to gather the funds required to create mass amounts of the penicillin required for clinical trials and looked to the United States for assistance.


A search worldwide began for the ideal strain of penicillin mold that would create the largest amount of the mold when it was grown in a vat containing corn steep liquor and strangely, it was not discovered abroad, but right at property in Peoria in a marketplace next to the lab assisting Oxford with the production of the mold.


By practically the end of 1941, Andrew J. Moyer, a mold nutrition professional, succeeded in multiplying the penicillin production by 10 times and by the year 1943, the clinical trials necessary to approve the penicillin doses for public use.


These doses were really pricey in the year 1940, but as time went on, they became much much less pricey, becoming around a dose in July of 1943, and around fifty cents per dose in 1946.


About four years following penicillin had begun becoming produced on a big scale in 1943, bacteria and other microbes started resisting it.


Staphylococcus aureus was one of the 1st to successfully battle penicillin and although it is a regular, mostly harmless inhabitant of the human body, it can cause pneumonia or TSS (toxic shock syndrome, associated with the use of tampons) when it begins to multiply in large numbers. It then begins to produce a toxin and this is what makes the person ill.

Oxford University History