Penicillin Trivia
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47 free Penicillin trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This penicillin trivia quiz covers the drug that changed medicine. The easy questions handle the basics: who discovered it, what kind of organism it comes from, roughly when it happened, and what it is used to fight. The harder end goes into the story and the science: the September 1928 petri dish, why Fleming could not convince anyone, Cecil Paine's forgotten first cure, Howard Florey and Ernst Chain's Oxford team, the policeman Albert Alexander, the Cocoanut Grove fire, the mouldy cantaloupe that transformed production, corn steep liquor and deep-tank fermentation, why patients' urine was collected, how the beta-lactam ring wrecks a bacterial cell wall, penicillinase and MRSA, Dorothy Hodgkin's X-ray structure and John Sheehan's first synthesis. Every answer was checked against the encyclopaedia entry before publishing and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. Our medicine, medical history and vaccine quizzes are the natural next stop.
30 of 47 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Alexander Fleming, the discoverer of penicillin, grew up on a farm in which country?
Scotland
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.
Q 02The mould Penicillium, which gave penicillin its name, is itself named after the Latin for which tool?
A paintbrush
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.
Q 03Penicillins belong to which class of antibiotics, named for a ring in their structure?
Beta-lactams
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.
Q 04Fleming first saw penicillin at work in 1928 on a plate left out during what?
A summer holiday
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.
Q 05Fleming said he named penicillin on the same lines as which older drug?
Digitalin
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'.
Q 06What did Cecil George Paine treat in 1930 in the first successful clinical use of penicillin?
An eye infection in newborns
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.
Q 07Which two scientists led the Oxford team that isolated purified penicillin in 1940?
Howard Florey and Ernst Chain
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.
Q 08Who built the makeshift equipment for Oxford's first penicillin doses, yet was left out of the 1945 Nobel Prize?
Norman Heatley
Norman Heatley, whose improvised apparatus extracted enough penicillin for the first trials. Oxford made amends only decades later, with an honorary doctorate of medicine.
Q 09Albert Alexander, the first patient treated with the Oxford penicillin in 1941, was what by profession?
A policeman
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.
Q 10Which 1942 Boston disaster's survivors were the first burn patients treated with penicillin?
The Cocoanut Grove nightclub fire
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.
Q 11Fleming's 1942 cure of a patient dying of meningitis was reported in a famous article in which newspaper?
The Times
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.
Q 12In 1941 two Oxford scientists flew to America with penicillin mould smeared into their coats, heading for which Illinois city?
Peoria
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.
Q 13Which sexually transmitted disease, treated for decades with toxic arsenic compounds, was shown in 1943 to yield to penicillin?
Q 21Why did the leader of Oxford's penicillin team never patent the drug?
He judged it unethical
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.
Q 22The pathologist who led Oxford's penicillin team was a Rhodes Scholar from which country?
Australia
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.
Q 23Dorothy Hodgkin, who solved penicillin's structure, taught chemistry at Oxford to which future prime minister?
Syphilis
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.
Q 14The mould strain that made wartime mass production of penicillin possible was found in 1943 on which fruit in a market?
A cantaloupe
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.
Q 15What by-product of maize processing proved to be the ideal culture medium for growing penicillin mould?
Corn steep liquor
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.
Q 16America's wartime penicillin drive aimed to stockpile enough for the casualties of which operation?
The D-Day landings
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.
Q 17Which small citric-acid maker opened the first commercial deep-tank penicillin plant in a converted Brooklyn ice factory in 1944?
Pfizer
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'.
Q 18Short of laboratory glassware in wartime, the Oxford penicillin team grew its mould in which borrowed hospital vessels?
Bedpans
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.
Q 19Why was urine collected from early penicillin patients?
To recover and reuse the excreted drug
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.
Q 20Which drug, now used mainly for gout, was once given to make penicillin last longer in the body?
Probenecid
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.
Margaret Thatcher
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.
Q 24Which wartime leader was treated with penicillin by his physician, Theodor Morell, after being wounded in 1944?
Adolf Hitler
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.
Q 25The 1957 discovery of penicillin's 'nucleus' led to which tailor-made penicillin, launched in 1972 and now among the most prescribed antibiotics?
Amoxicillin
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.
Q 26Why can't penicillin G be taken by mouth?
It is destroyed by stomach acid
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.
Q 27Years before penicillin, Fleming discovered which germ-dissolving enzyme in nasal mucus, tears and saliva?
Lysozyme
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.
Q 28Scientists in which occupied country secretly made penicillin in 1944, code-named Bacinol, while keeping their German guard drunk on gin?
Netherlands
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.
Q 29Penicillin kills growing bacteria by sabotaging the construction of which part of the cell?
The cell wall
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.
Q 30Which family of drugs, launched in Germany with Prontosil in the 1930s, was doctors' main weapon against bacteria until penicillin arrived?
Sulfonamides
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.