Penicillin and antibiotics

• Antibiotics


  Substance that controls the spread of bacteria in the body by killing them or stopping them reproducing
• Death from an infection could be prevented if people were treated with antibiotics quickly
• The first antibiotic, penicillin, was discovered


  1928
• Alexander Fleming's discovery of penicillin


  • He was studying the wounds of soldiers and infections caused by the staphylococci bacteria
  • He left some dishes on the windowsill containing the bacteria and went on holiday
  • Above his laboratory, a scientist was working with penicillin mould
  • The penicillin mould landed on the dishes and killed the staphylococci bacteria
  • Fleming noticed the penicillin mould could kill bacteria without harming other nearby cells
  • He successfully used penicillin to treat a friend's eye infection
  • Penicillin did not work on deeper infections and it took a long time to create enough penicillin to use
  • In 1929, Fleming wrote about his findings in a medical journal but did not continue with his study
• Howard Florey and Ernst Chain's development of penicillin

  • In 1938, they read Fleming's article on penicillin and realised it could be effective
  • They secured money from America to enable them to carry out more research
  • They discovered penicillin was able to cure infections in mice
  • They started work using bedpans to build a home penicillin factory to create pure penicillin
  • By 1941, they had made enough pure penicillin to test it on a human, a policeman called Albert Alexander who had a bacterial infection
  • The treatment worked and Alexander's infection began to clear up, but they ran out of penicillin after a week and he died
• Florey and Chain had shown that penicillin could be successful in treating bacterial infections
• Mass production of penicillin

  1. In 1941, America entered World War Two and the American government realised the potential importance of penicillin for treating wounded soldiers and funded its mass production

  2. British companies followed

  3. By D-Day in 1944, the Allies had produced 2.3 million doses with which to treat the wounded