New light on the history of penicillin.

PENICILLIN WAS discovered by Alexander Fleming in September 1928 while he was a member of the staff of the Inoculation Department (now the Wright Fleming Institute) at St. Mary's Hospital, London, and had just been appointed Professor of Bacteriology in the University of London. He had noticed an unusual phenomenon, absence of fully developed colonies of a common microbe, Staphylococcus aureus, round a large colony of a common mould, Penicillium notatum, on an old culture plate. Research during the following winter showed that this had been due to the production by the mould of a hitherto unknown substance which was unique in that, although harmless to animals, it could kill disease-producing microbes. This naturally suggested its employment for the treatment of the diseases caused by such microbes, but proof of its value for this purpose was not obtained until twelve years later, when a team of workers led by Professor Howard Florey in the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology in the University of Oxford was successful. .2.3 Florey and his colleagues were wise enough to publish a definitive account of their work soon afterwards.4 Unfortunately, Fleming did no such thing, contenting himself with a few sentences or very short paragraphs in medical journals, most of them with very limited circulation.' This, together with what Maurois had to say in his biography of Fleming, whose English translation by Gerard Hopkins was published in 1959, has provided most of what is known about the part played by its discoverer in the development of penicillin as a therapeutic agent.6