Antibiotics Trivia
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120 free Antibiotics trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Antibiotics trivia goes well beyond the mouldy petri dish. Before penicillin there was Paul Ehrlich's arsenic 'magic bullet' for syphilis and Bayer's red dye Prontosil; after Fleming there was a team in Oxford growing mould in bedpans, a cantaloupe from a market in Peoria, corn steep liquor, and 2.3 million doses ready for D-Day. And before all of that, apparently, there were Nubians drinking tetracycline in their beer. This quiz covers the whole arc: the ancient hints, Ehrlich and Hata's compound 606, Domagk's Nobel, Fleming's plate at St Mary's, Florey, Chain, Heatley and Hodgkin, the policeman who died when the drug ran out, urine recycling, probenecid, how the β-lactam ring breaks the bacterial cell wall, β-lactamases and clavulanic acid, ampicillin and methicillin, MRSA, colistin-resistant E. coli, WHO consumption tables, the EU's ban on growth promoters, and the phage, antisense and CRISPR ideas queued up to replace what we are losing. Easy questions suit anyone who has finished a course; expert ones assume you know who first synthesised penicillin in a flask. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on antibiotics and penicillin, and the supporting sentence is attached to each question.
30 of 120 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Antibiotics work against bacteria but are useless against which of these?
Viruses
Viruses. That is why antibiotics do nothing for a cold or flu, and prescribing them for such infections anyway is one of the commonest ways the drugs are misused.
Q 02What does the word 'antibiotic' literally mean, from its Greek roots?
'Opposing life'
'Opposing life'. It joins the Greek anti, against, to bios, life, and it began as an adjective for anything that destroyed microbes; only in the 1940s did it become the noun for the drugs.
Q 03Who discovered penicillin after noticing mould on a culture plate at a London hospital?
Alexander Fleming
Alexander Fleming. His assistants could never purify the unstable 'mould juice', so his 1929 paper made only a passing mention of using it as a medicine, and few people noticed it.
Q 04At which London hospital was penicillin discovered?
St Mary's, Paddington
St Mary's, Paddington. The cramped laboratory survives as a museum, but the hospital never turned the find into a medicine; that took a team at Oxford more than a decade later.
Q 05Which bacterium was growing on the famous contaminated culture plate that led to penicillin?
Staphylococcus aureus
Staphylococcus aureus. Around the stray mould the colonies had vanished, leaving a clear ring, which showed that the mould was giving off something that stopped the bacteria growing.
Q 06Penicillium, the mould behind penicillin, is named after the Latin for what?
Paintbrush
Paintbrush. The Latin word is penicillus, and under the microscope the mould's spore-bearing tips fan out like the bristles of a tiny brush.
Q 07Penicillin's discoverer found it on returning from what?
Holiday
Holiday. He had left culture plates on his laboratory bench, and on 3 September 1928 he came back to find one of them spoiled by a stray mould.
Q 08Salvarsan, known in Paul Ehrlich's laboratory as compound 606, was the first effective drug against which disease?
Syphilis
Syphilis. Demand for it was worldwide and immediate, and it remained the standard cure until penicillin took its place in the 1940s.
Q 09Salvarsan, the first synthetic antibacterial drug, was a compound of which element?
Arsenic
Arsenic. Ehrlich's idea was to take a poison and reshape it chemically until it killed the microbe but spared the patient; the arsenic drug he started from had been dangerously toxic.
Q 10Gerhard Domagk developed Prontosil, the first sulfonamide, at the laboratories of which German company?
Bayer
Bayer. Domagk's own young daughter was among the first people Prontosil saved, yet when the discovery won him a Nobel Prize the Nazi government forced him to turn it down.
Q 11What kept the sulfa drug sulfanilamide from being patented?
It had long been used in the dye industry
It had long been used in the dye industry, so the compound was already off-patent and cheap to make. Any firm could sell it, and many companies were soon mass-producing sulfa drugs.
Q 12Selman Waksman, who first called these drugs 'antibiotics', won a Nobel Prize for which one?
Streptomycin
Streptomycin was isolated in 1943 by Albert Schatz, a graduate student in Waksman's laboratory, yet the 1952 Nobel Prize went to Waksman alone.
Q 13The 1945 Nobel Prize for penicillin was shared by its discoverer and which two Oxford scientists?
Q 21Doctors in the early penicillin era routinely recovered the drug for reuse from what?
Patients' urine
Patients' urine: the kidneys clear most of a dose within hours, almost completely unchanged, so hospitals collected it and extracted the penicillin to inject again.
Q 22Which gout drug was given with penicillin to make each dose last longer?
Probenecid
Probenecid keeps penicillin in the bloodstream for longer. Athletes later used the same effect to hide steroids from drug testers, and sport added it to the banned list for 1988.
Q 23Penicillin kills bacteria by blocking the final step in building which structure?
The cell wall
Howard Florey and Ernst Chain
Howard Florey and Ernst Chain proved the drug on eight infected mice in 1940: the four given penicillin lived, and the four left untreated were dead by the next morning.
Q 14Which Oxford crystallographer confirmed the structure of penicillin by X-ray in the 1940s?
Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin
Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin set aside her study of insulin to take on the urgent wartime job. She then went back to insulin, a far bigger molecule, and finally solved it in 1969.
Q 15Why did Albert Alexander, the first patient Oxford's team tried to cure with penicillin, die after rallying?
The drug ran out
The drug ran out: the laboratory could not make it fast enough to finish his course, and he relapsed and died weeks later. Later patients, treated for long enough, recovered.
Q 16The high-yield wartime penicillin mould was found on a mouldy what in a Peoria market?
Cantaloupe
Cantaloupe: after a worldwide hunt for a more productive mould, the best strain turned up at a market in the laboratory's own town, and its descendants went into mass production.
Q 17Which Midwestern farm by-product did the Peoria laboratory add to its vats to boost penicillin yields?
Corn steep liquor
Corn steep liquor, the liquid left over from milling cornstarch, let Peoria grow far more penicillin than Oxford ever had, and the method was passed on to the drug companies.
Q 18American factories raced to have penicillin ready in quantity for which Allied landings?
The Normandy landings
The Normandy landings of June 1944 were the target. Two years earlier America had made enough for only about ten patients; deep-tank fermentation then produced enough for the invasion force.
Q 19Antibiotics are often matched to 'Gram-positive' or 'Gram-negative' bacteria, labels that come from what?
A staining test
A staining test: the Danish bacteriologist Hans Christian Gram devised it while studying pneumonia, and found that some bacteria held his violet dye while others washed clean.
Q 20Why did the leader of Oxford's penicillin team never patent the drug?
He was advised it would be unethical
He was advised it would be unethical to profit from a life-saving drug, and Americans patented the production methods instead. When his team later found cephalosporin, he pressed to patent it at once.
The cell wall: with its cross-links left unfinished the wall weakens, water floods into the bacterium and it bursts.
Q 24Which structural feature of penicillin binds to bacterial enzymes and gives its drug family its name?
The β-lactam ring
The β-lactam ring mimics the building block these enzymes normally stitch together, so they seize the drug instead and are put out of action.
Q 25Bacteria often pass antibiotic-resistance genes to one another on small rings of DNA called what?
Plasmids
Plasmids can be copied from one bacterium into another, even one of a different species, so a single resistance gene can jump between unrelated germs in the same hospital.
Q 26Why is clavulanic acid added to some penicillin-type antibiotics?
It disables the bacteria's defensive enzyme
It disables the bacteria's defensive enzyme by acting as a decoy: the enzyme locks onto clavulanic acid, itself a natural product of another microbe, and leaves the real antibiotic alone.
Q 27Which penicillin, launched in 1961, was the first with a broad spectrum that reached Gram-negative bacteria?
Ampicillin
Ampicillin differs from the original penicillin by a single amino group, which helps it slip through the pores in the outer membrane of Gram-negative bacteria.
Q 28The 'M' in the superbug MRSA stands for resistance to which antibiotic?
Methicillin
Methicillin reached hospitals around 1960 and resistant staph was spotted within a year. A 2017 genetic study traced those strains back to the 1940s, probably bred by penicillin itself.
Q 29Penicillin's core molecule, 6-APA, was isolated in the 1950s by scientists at which British company?
Beecham
Beecham chemists could now bolt new side chains onto the bare penicillin core, and every semi-synthetic penicillin since has been built on that molecule.
Q 30Stomach ulcers became curable with antibiotics after Barry Marshall swallowed a culture of which bacterium?
Helicobacter pylori
Helicobacter pylori made him ill within days, backing his case that an infection, not stress, lay behind ulcers. He and Robin Warren shared the 2005 Nobel Prize for the discovery.