Author(s): Eric Lax

Non-Fiction

Many people know that in the autumn of 1928 Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin's antibiotic potential by chance while examining a stray mould that had bloomed in a dish of bacteria in his London laboratory. But few realise that Fleming was unable to isolate penicillin from the medium it grows in, and that he is merely one - and by no means the most important - character in the remarkable story of the antibiotic's development as a drug. The others are Howard Florey, an Australian who in 1935 was made Professor Pathology at Oxford University, where he would run the Sir William Dunn School; the German Jewish imigrant Ernst Chain, who in 1935, while working at Cambridge University, was recommended to Florey; and Norman Heatley, one of the few scientists in Britain capable of the precise micro-analysis of organic substances, who in 1936 joined Florey and Chain at Oxford, and whose practical genius was critical.