Miracle Cure
by William Rosen · 14 Apr 2017 · 515pp · 117,501 words
Fleming’s next encounter with good fortune, which occurred some five years later. Credit: Wellcome Library, London Alexander Fleming, 1881–1955 The canonical story of the discovery of penicillin is eerily similar to the one describing the chance discovery of lysozyme. As Fleming later recalled, he had sloppily left Petri dishes containing staph cultures
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present before the staph, no ring of bacterial death. This doesn’t mean that Fleming was fraudulent, or even forgetful, either in his account of the discovery of lysozyme or of penicillin. The most appealing explanation for the discrepancies between either account and, well, logic, is something else: playfulness. Fleming grew up in a family
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been the equivalent of drawing a winning hand at bridge. Understanding why he would trot out such a similar story for the far more important discovery of penicillin requires some additional context. The first, and most important, fact about the discovery is that hardly anything about it was documented at the time. Six
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significant matter of credit, which, as we shall see, would become a very thorny issue indeed. Insofar as any one person is associated with the discovery of penicillin—of antibiotics generally—in the public consciousness, it’s likely to be Alexander Fleming. It was considerably easier for Fleming to become the first hero
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as having been foreseen and worked out by Fleming and that we in this department just did a few final flourishes.” Public confusion about the discovery of penicillin goes on. Recreations in a BBC documentary from the 1970s include a dramatized Fleming preparing the compound to treat Albert Alexander, and even got the
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the very tangible profits that would be generated by the discoveries that followed. FIVE “To See the Problem Clearly” The battles over credit for the discovery of penicillin were still a year in the future when Howard Florey left Peoria in the summer of 1941. He left Heatley behind to work with Moyer
The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance
by Laurie Garrett · 31 Oct 1994 · 1,293pp · 357,735 words
on why U.S. medicine had been so slow to deal with this rise in all sexually transmitted diseases: … following World War II and the discovery of penicillin, many doctors and public health authorities believed that syphilis and gonorrhea, then the most important known forms of sexually transmitted diseases in the United States
The Rise and Fall of Modern Medicine
by M. D. James le Fanu M. D. · 1 Jan 1999 · 564pp · 163,106 words
. . . This book is well worth reading just for the brilliant pen portraits of Le Fanu’s twelve definitive moments of medical advance. Some, like the discovery of penicillin, are well known, but even here the author has a way of encapsulation that is full of insights and unusual detail . . . It would be possible
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this book is to describe what happened next, starting with an account of the ‘twelve definitive moments’ – the ‘canon’ – of modern medicine. 1 1941: PENICILLIN The discovery of penicillin is, predictably, both the first of the twelve definitive moments of the modern therapeutic revolution and the most important. Penicillin and the other antibiotics
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public imagination antibiotics came to symbolise the almost limitless beneficent possibilities of science. Yet this is not entirely merited, for, as will be seen, the discovery of penicillin was not the product of scientific reasoning but rather an accident – much more improbable than is commonly appreciated. Further, at the core of antibiotics lies
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manufacture of proteins in the cell.10 Next, the chemistry of antibiotic molecules is very unusual. It was hoped in the early days following the discovery of penicillin that the drug could be synthesised, thus avoiding the necessity of growing the penicillium mould in vast fermentation plants. But that was not to be
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extraordinary phenomenon the sulphonamides represented. But this is only the beginning of the story of their contribution to modern medicine. They were, up until the discovery of penicillin, the only effective drugs against infectious disease and, besides being widely prescribed, were naturally a focus of great scientific interest. Consequently a whole series of
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of Penicillin. See also John Henderson, ‘The Yellow Brick Road to Penicillin: A Story of Serendipity’, PSMMC, 1997, Vol. 72, pp. 683–7; Alexander Fleming, ‘Discovery of Penicillin’, British Medical Bulletin, 1944, Vol. 2, pp. 4–5. 4.Alexander Fleming, ‘On the Antibacterial Action of Cultures of a Penicillium, With Special Reference to
Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health
by Laurie Garrett · 15 Feb 2000
quantities of the drug that had passed into the urine of a treated patient could be used to cure another.161 Within months of Mahoney’s discovery of the utility of penicillin in syphilis treatment, the New York City health department opened a special VD ward at Bellevue Hospital and distributed free penicillin to doctors
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, 496, 499, 500, 502–4, 512, 520–22, 523, 532–33, 736 antibiotics black market in, 58, 125, 181, 189, 229 child deaths and, 619 discovery of penicillin, 325–26 in livestock, 467–69, 722 microbes resistant to, 32, 53, 179–82, 193, 195, 196, 229, 237, 239–40, 242, 265, 271–81
The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer
by Siddhartha Mukherjee · 16 Nov 2010 · 1,294pp · 210,361 words
wrote. “It is extraordinarily difficult to predict scientific discovery, which is often propelled by seminal insights coming from unexpected directions. The classic example—Fleming’s discovery of penicillin on moldy bread and the monumental impact of that accidental finding—could not easily have been predicted, nor could the sudden demise of iron-lung
10% Human: How Your Body's Microbes Hold the Key to Health and Happiness
by Alanna Collen · 4 May 2015 · 372pp · 111,573 words
carried a high risk of death, and minor cuts could kill. This prediction is as old as antibiotics themselves. Sir Alexander Fleming, after making his discovery of penicillin, repeatedly cautioned that using too little of it, for too short a time, or without good reason, would bring about antibiotic resistance. He was right
Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures
by Merlin Sheldrake · 11 May 2020
. 2017. Plant-soil feedbacks and mycorrhizal type influence temperate forest population dynamics. Science 355: 181–84. Bennett JW, Chung KT. 2001. Alexander Fleming and the discovery of penicillin. Advances in Applied Microbiology 49: 163–84. Berendsen RL, Pieterse CM, Bakker PA. 2012. The rhizosphere microbiome and plant health. Trends in Plant Science 17
Abundance
by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson · 18 Mar 2025 · 227pp · 84,566 words
been treated with penicillin. Two of them had died.4 * * * Let’s pause the narrative here, as strange as this interruption might seem. Fleming’s discovery of penicillin is world-famous: cherished by scientists and hailed as one of the most significant breakthroughs in the history of health, or any other field. Florey
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the mixture, producing a worthless sludge. (The historian James Phinney Baxter III elegantly described the irony: “The same accident of contamination which led to the discovery of penicillin very nearly prevented its use.”) With OSRD’s encouragement, scientists in Peoria, Illinois, discovered that adding “corn steep”—water soaked with corn—could increase penicillin
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.pdf. 14. Baxter, Scientists Against Time, Kindle, 528, and see 522–27. 15. Baxter, Scientists Against Time, Kindle, 530–32. 16. Christen Rayner, “How the Discovery of Penicillin Has Influenced Modern Medicine,” Oxford Scientist, June 1, 2020, https://oxsci.org/how-penicillin-has-influenced-modern-medicine/. 17. Derek Thompson, “Why the Age of
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abundance potential for, 1–4 Affordable Care Act (2010), 7 big government–small government divide on, 105–6 NIH funding for research (see National Institutes of Health) penicillin discovery, 169–71, 174–75, 176, 180, 183–85, 202 politics of invention and, 134–36 scarcity of primary-care physicians, 190–91 supply-side
Vaccinated: One Man's Quest to Defeat the World's Deadliest Diseases
by Paul A. Offit · 1 Jan 2007 · 300pp · 84,762 words
of tens of thousands of Allied soldiers. Ten years after abandoning his research on penicillin, Alexander Fleming won the Nobel Prize in medicine “for the discovery of penicillin and its curative effect in various infectious diseases.” Although our understanding of what penicillin is, how it works, and how it can be used to
The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World From Scratch
by Lewis Dartnell · 15 Apr 2014 · 398pp · 100,679 words
made from an oak bookcase discarded by the university library—inspiration, perhaps, for the scavenging and jury-rigging necessary after the apocalypse. So while the discovery of penicillin is often portrayed as accidental and almost effortless, Fleming’s observation was only the very first step on a long road of research and development
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