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health · 1928 to 1945
Alexander Fleming found penicillin by accident in 1928, but a wartime shortage of doses forced rival drug companies into a decision no patent lawyer would recommend: pool their production secrets.
Facts drawn from the Nobel Prize archive, the American Chemical Society's landmark history, and a peer-reviewed account of the wartime manufacturing collaboration; interpretive framing is labeled as modeled analysis.
Fleming noticed in 1928 that a mold contaminating one of his petri dishes had killed the bacteria around it, and he published the observation, but he lacked the chemistry to purify or mass-produce the compound. The finding sat mostly unused for over a decade while medicine had no reliable way to treat bacterial infection at scale.
At Oxford, Howard Florey and Ernst Chain led a team that purified the mold's active compound and proved in 1940 that it could cure infected mice, then pushed on to the first human trials. Their colleague Norman Heatley carried a culture to the United States Department of Agriculture's laboratory in Peoria, Illinois in 1941, where researchers found a corn-steep-liquor growth medium and a more productive mold strain that multiplied the yield per batch.