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Fleming and Penicilin

The discovery :

The antibiotic chemical called penicillin was discovered in 1928 by Alexander Fleming.
10 years later Howard Florey and Ernst Chain developed methods for purifying enough penicillin to prove its value as a drug.
In 1945, the 3 scientists were awarded the Nobel Prize.

The process :

Penicillin kills by preventing some bacteria from forming new cell walls. One by one, the bacteria die because they cannot complete the process of division that produces two new “daughter” bacteria from a single “parent” bacterium.

Some bacteria are able to resist the action of antibiotic drugs, including penicillin.
Taking antibiotics for viral illnesses causes antibiotic resistant bacteria to develop and may eventually cause disease.

Alexander Fleming isolated the chemical “penicillin” from a mold which had prevented the growth of a neighboring colony of germs growing in a petri dish.
Fleming became the first person to publish the news of its germ-killing power.
The penicillin’s ability to cure people of many once fatal bacterial infections has saved so many lives that it is easy to understand why it was once called a “miracle drug”.

It is still a “front line” antibiotic, in common use for some bacterial infections altough the developement of penicillin-resistance in several pathologenic bacteria now limits its effectiveness.