the.com/penicillin
the world's greatest discovery, found because someone forgot to wash a dish
means An antibiotic drug derived from Penicillium mold, used to kill or stop the growth of bacteria and treat infections that were once routinely fatal.
from From the mold genus Penicillium, named by Latinists for its look under the microscope: penicillium is Latin for 'little brush' or 'painter's brush' (a diminutive of penicillus, itself a tiny version of peniculus, 'brush' — and yes, distantly tangled with the Latin root that also gives us 'pencil'). The spores fan out like fine bristles, so the mold wore the name long before its secret was found. Alexander Fleming coined 'penicillin' for the bacteria-killing substance the mold quietly produced.
- lucky mold
- Fleming spotted it on a contaminated petri dish in 1928
- war hero
- mass-produced just in time to save D-Day soldiers
- source spore
- a moldy cantaloupe boosted production yields hugely
- lives saved
- estimated to have saved over 200 million people
- allergy risk
- about 10 percent of people report being allergic
fleming's mold discovery — alexander fleming's petri dish contamination at st. mary's hospital, london, 1928
oxford florey chain team — howard florey and ernst boris chain purified and mass-produced penicillin at oxford university, 1939-1941
d-day soldier treatment — penicillin first used on wounded soldiers during the d-day invasion of normandy, june 1944