47 Fun Facts About Penicillin

Alexander Fleming, the discoverer of penicillin, grew up on a farm in which country?

Scotland. Fleming left the family farm in Ayrshire for London at 13 and spent four years as a shipping clerk before a scholarship took him to St Mary's Hospital, where he stayed for the rest of his career.

The mould Penicillium, which gave penicillin its name, is itself named after the Latin for which tool?

A paintbrush: under the microscope the mould's spore-bearing stalks fan out like bristles. The same Latin word, penicillus, also gave English 'pencil', which first meant a fine artist's brush.

Penicillins belong to which class of antibiotics, named for a ring in their structure?

Beta-lactams. The four-atom ring is both the drug's warhead and its weak point: bacteria that make enzymes able to snap it open shrug the drug off, and that is the commonest way they resist penicillin.

Fleming first saw penicillin at work in 1928 on a plate left out during what?

A summer holiday. The plate was never incubated, so a stray mould, probably drifting up from a laboratory on the floor below, grew alongside the bacteria; Fleming published in 1929, but it was ten years before anyone made a drug of it.

Fleming said he named penicillin on the same lines as which older drug?

Digitalin, from the foxglove genus Digitalis. Fleming told his Nobel audience he had simply followed that pattern with the mould Penicillium; his 1929 paper says the new word spared him repeating 'mould broth filtrate'.

What did Cecil George Paine treat in 1930 in the first successful clinical use of penicillin?

An eye infection in newborns. Cecil Paine, a former student of Fleming's working in Sheffield, treated the babies with crude mould extract; his case notes resurfaced decades later as the earliest surviving records of penicillin treatment.

Which two scientists led the Oxford team that isolated purified penicillin in 1940?

Howard Florey and Ernst Chain. Florey ran Oxford's pathology school and Chain was a refugee from Nazi Berlin who nearly became a concert pianist; their tempers clashed, not least over Chain's wish to patent the drug.

Who built the makeshift equipment for Oxford's first penicillin doses, yet was left out of the 1945 Nobel Prize?

Norman Heatley, whose improvised apparatus extracted enough penicillin for the first trials. Oxford made amends only decades later, with an honorary doctorate of medicine.

Albert Alexander, the first patient treated with the Oxford penicillin in 1941, was what by profession?

A policeman. Albert Alexander rallied within a day of his first injection, but the tiny supply ran out before he was cured and he relapsed and died; after that the team treated children, who needed smaller doses.

Which 1942 Boston disaster's survivors were the first burn patients treated with penicillin?

The Cocoanut Grove nightclub fire, which killed 492 people. Merck rushed 32 litres of penicillin broth to Boston for the survivors, and its success helped persuade Washington to mass-produce the drug for the armed forces.

Fleming's 1942 cure of a patient dying of meningitis was reported in a famous article in which newspaper?

The Times. Fleming's chief wrote in to claim the laurels for him; Fleming then gave interviews while the Oxford scientists were forbidden to, and the legend of the lone discoverer took hold.

In 1941 two Oxford scientists flew to America with penicillin mould smeared into their coats, heading for which Illinois city?

Peoria. They rubbed the spores into their coats in case the vials were lost or stolen; one of them stayed on at the government laboratory there for six months, and its methods went on to raise yields more than tenfold.

Which sexually transmitted disease, treated for decades with toxic arsenic compounds, was shown in 1943 to yield to penicillin?

Syphilis. John Mahoney's trials in 1943 swept away the arsenic drug Salvarsan, which Fleming himself had once injected into wealthy private patients; within a year penicillin was the armed forces' main treatment.

The mould strain that made wartime mass production of penicillin possible was found in 1943 on which fruit in a market?

A cantaloupe. After a search that drew samples from as far away as Chongqing and Cape Town, the winner turned up mouldy in a market near the laboratory, and it yielded sixfold more penicillin than Fleming's strain.

What by-product of maize processing proved to be the ideal culture medium for growing penicillin mould?

Corn steep liquor, the waste water left from soaking corn for starch. The government laboratory had been trying it in every fermentation in the hope of finding a use for it; fed to the penicillin mould, it raised yields tenfold.

America's wartime penicillin drive aimed to stockpile enough for the casualties of which operation?

The D-Day landings. Output leapt from 21 billion units in 1943 to 1,663 billion in 1944, and the Oxford team's leader later said that without American factories there would not have been enough for the Normandy wounded.

Which small citric-acid maker opened the first commercial deep-tank penicillin plant in a converted Brooklyn ice factory in 1944?

Pfizer. It already fermented citric acid from molasses in stirred tanks and bet the company on adapting the method, though its vice-president grumbled that the mould was 'as temperamental as an opera singer'.

Short of laboratory glassware in wartime, the Oxford penicillin team grew its mould in which borrowed hospital vessels?

Bedpans, along with baths, milk churns and food tins. The mould needs a wide, shallow surface open to the air, so the team later had hundreds of bedpan-shaped ceramic pots made to order.

Why was urine collected from early penicillin patients?

To recover and reuse the excreted drug. Penicillin passes out of the body within hours almost unchanged, so the Oxford team extracted it from patients' urine, purified it and injected it again.

Which drug, now used mainly for gout, was once given to make penicillin last longer in the body?

Probenecid. It competes with penicillin for the same exit route from the bloodstream, so each dose lingered longer; decades later doctors proposed the same trick to stretch supplies of a bird-flu drug.

Why did the leader of Oxford's penicillin team never patent the drug?

He judged it unethical: a life-saving drug, he argued, should benefit everyone. His biochemist partner, used to German practice, fought the decision for years, and American firms later patented the production methods instead.

The pathologist who led Oxford's penicillin team was a Rhodes Scholar from which country?

Australia. He grew up in Adelaide and reached Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship; back home, an army team had penicillin flowing to troops in New Guinea by Christmas 1943, among the first national supplies in the world.

Dorothy Hodgkin, who solved penicillin's structure, taught chemistry at Oxford to which future prime minister?

Margaret Thatcher, who read chemistry at Oxford in the 1940s. Hodgkin backed Labour and campaigned against nuclear weapons, yet the Conservative prime minister kept her old tutor's picture in Downing Street.

Which wartime leader was treated with penicillin by his physician, Theodor Morell, after being wounded in 1944?

Adolf Hitler, after the bomb plot of July 1944. Germany could make only tiny amounts of penicillin, and some of what his doctor used appears to have been captured from the Allies, so their drug may have helped save him.

The 1957 discovery of penicillin's 'nucleus' led to which tailor-made penicillin, launched in 1972 and now among the most prescribed antibiotics?

Amoxicillin. With the bare core in hand, chemists could bolt on new side chains to order, and this one gave a drug absorbed so well by mouth that it became the usual choice in its class.

Why can't penicillin G be taken by mouth?

It is destroyed by stomach acid, so it has to be injected. The fix came from an Austrian firm in 1952: penicillin V, an acid-proof variant that could at last be swallowed as a tablet.

Years before penicillin, Fleming discovered which germ-dissolving enzyme in nasal mucus, tears and saliva?

Lysozyme. He first saw it at work in mucus from a streaming cold, and although it proved too weak to use as a drug, the methods he devised to measure it were the ones he turned on penicillin when it appeared.

Scientists in which occupied country secretly made penicillin in 1944, code-named Bacinol, while keeping their German guard drunk on gin?

The Netherlands. Working from Fleming's 1929 paper and a smuggled Swiss journal, a Delft yeast factory brewed the drug in milk bottles under the nose of a guard who, by the team's own account, slept off his gin most afternoons.

Penicillin kills growing bacteria by sabotaging the construction of which part of the cell?

The cell wall. Penicillin jams the enzymes that stitch the wall's mesh together, so as a bacterium grows its wall weakens until water floods in and the cell bursts; bacteria that are not growing are left unharmed.

Which family of drugs, launched in Germany with Prontosil in the 1930s, was doctors' main weapon against bacteria until penicillin arrived?

Sulfonamides, the 'sulfa drugs'. Their discoverer, Gerhard Domagk, tried Prontosil on his own sick child, and when he was awarded the 1939 Nobel Prize the Nazi government forced him to turn it down.

Which group of bacteria, named for how they take up a laboratory stain, is most vulnerable to penicillin?

Gram-positive. They have no outer membrane, so the drug reaches its target unhindered; Gram-negative bacteria wrap themselves in an extra fatty layer that penicillin can cross only slowly, through narrow pores.

Which compound is added to some penicillins, as in the drug Augmentin, to block the bacterial enzymes that would destroy them?

Clavulanic acid. It works as a decoy, tying up the enzymes so the penicillin survives; such enzymes were first spotted in 1940, years before penicillin was widely available.

Which hospital 'superbug' is named after a penicillin it resists?

MRSA. The 'M' stands for methicillin, a penicillin designed to beat resistant bacteria; strains that shrugged it off turned up in British hospitals within about two years, and they resist most related drugs as well.

Which British pill-and-powder maker isolated penicillin's core and launched ampicillin in 1961?

Beecham. The firm had grown rich on a Victorian laxative pill 'worth a guinea a box' before it built a research laboratory in Surrey; its ampicillin was the first penicillin by mouth to attack both great classes of bacteria.

Which technique let Dorothy Hodgkin settle the structure of penicillin in 1945, when leading chemists were split over it?

X-ray crystallography. Hodgkin's pictures showed the fragile four-atom ring that Oxford's biochemists had proposed and overturned the rival structure backed by the university's most senior organic chemist.

Which quick check shows most people labelled penicillin-allergic can take it safely?

A skin test. Eight or nine in ten of those who are properly tested turn out not to be allergic: the sensitivity often fades with the years, so a rash in childhood rarely means a lifelong ban.

Penicillin cannot touch which everyday illness, though many patients still ask for antibiotics to treat it?

The common cold. Colds are caused by viruses, which penicillin cannot touch; yet many patients still expect antibiotics for one, and each needless course helps breed resistant bacteria.

Which closely related antibiotic family can most penicillin-allergic patients still take, because true cross-reactions are rare?

Cephalosporins. They share penicillin's core ring yet set off its allergy only a few per cent of the time; the first came from a mould found in the sea off Sardinia in 1945 and was developed in the same Oxford laboratory as penicillin.

Which technique let the Oxford team turn its fragile penicillin solution into a stable powder without destroying it with heat?

Freeze-drying. Boiling the water off would have wrecked the drug, so the solution was frozen and the ice drawn off under vacuum, leaving a brown powder that was still mostly impurities.

Which bacterium, a common cause of boils, was growing on the plate where Fleming first saw penicillin at work?

Staphylococcus. Around the stray mould its colonies had turned glassy and were dissolving; the same microbe later gave Oxford its yardstick, a unit defined by how much penicillin it took to stop a standard strain growing.

Penicillin blocking chloroplast division in mosses supports which idea about plastid evolution?

The endosymbiotic theory, which holds that chloroplasts began as free-living bacteria swallowed by another cell. Moss chloroplasts still divide with machinery inherited from those bacteria, so a bacteria-killing drug can stop them.

In Oxford's decisive penicillin test of May 1940, eight animals were infected and only the four treated survived; what were they?

Mice. By the next morning all four untreated ones were dead, a result one of the team called a miracle; even so, it took the team nine more months to make enough of the drug to treat its first patient.

Thousands of years before penicillin, healers in ancient Egypt pressed which mouldy food onto wounds to keep infection at bay?

Bread. Mouldy loaves were laid on wounds as poultices; nobody knew why they sometimes worked, but many moulds make germ-killing chemicals of their own, the principle Fleming stumbled on in 1928.

In which journal did the Oxford team announce in August 1940 that penicillin cured infections in animals?

The Lancet. The paper, 'Penicillin as a Chemotherapeutic Agent', listed its seven authors in strict alphabetical order, which is why the head of the laboratory appears second and the man who built its equipment fourth.

Which US government department ran the Midwestern laboratory that worked out how to mass-produce penicillin?

The Department of Agriculture. Its fermentation chemists were already hunting for ways to use up farm by-products, and their know-how with giant vats was exactly what war-strained Britain could not spare.

Penicillin passed its first safety tests on rats, rabbits and cats; luckily nobody tried which laboratory animal, to which it is toxic?

Guinea pigs. Penicillin upsets their gut bacteria and can kill them, so had the Oxford team reached for that classic test animal, the drug might have been written off as a poison before it reached a single patient.

Which American foundation paid for the Oxford scientists' 1941 trip to the United States in search of penicillin manufacturers?

The Rockefeller Foundation, which was already helping to fund the Oxford research. Britain's drug makers were stretched by the war, so the foundation paid for a three-month American visit to find firms that could brew the mould in bulk.