As we all know, Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin in 1928. However, he could produce only tiny amounts. It wasn't until World War II that we figured out how to mass produce it:
After a worldwide search in 1943, a mouldy cantaloupe in a Peoria, Illinois market was found to contain the best strain of mould for production using the corn steep liquor process.
Peoria! It's famous for something besides "Will it play on Peoria?" Also, Betty Friedan and Richard Pryor were born in Peoria.
Penicillin is not usually on lists of discoveries made during WWII, but it probably should be.
I forget where I ran across it, but one of the Medical Association webpages had (has) a Hall of Heros. A listing of MD's of the Association who served with distinction in WW2. If you read the bios, it is almost uniform. "One day we got penicillin, and patients who would have died did not."
My father was a doctor in WWII. I will never forget him telling us about the first time penicillin was available. There was a soldier who had a badly infected wound who was given the first dose of penicillin. Dad said it was so amazing to see the man sitting up and talking within 24 hours. He said that was the one drug he ever used that he would call a miracle drug.
Whut!!!!!
Why you putti8ng the hate on Caterpillar?????
Except for having been discovered in 1928...
But it did see wide spread use till WWIi. The Germans did not have penicillin, and during the North African campaign would sometimes arrange trades under a truce flag to obtain it. German intelligence made efforts to steal the original mould strain, not realizing the allies had switched to a new far more productive strain that had been caught in the wild.
Despite the difficulty of production, penicillin got a lot of mindshare during the 1930s, with a handful of highly-publicized cures. This was the origin of the whole "miracle drug" trope (in the same way that the emergence of AT&T and RCA gave rise to all the ensuing desperate quests for "the next big thing" on the stock market -- without which, for example, no Elon Musk). It is more like aluminum, which was discovered in 1827 but did not become cheap and ubiquitous until about sixty years later; the development of the Hall process was not the "discovery" of aluminum.
Penicillin saved many of the victims of the infamous Cocoanut Grove fire in Boston. It was a nightclub fire, and a lot of people were killed or seriously injured. A lot of the survivors were MFC, measure for coffin, until dosed with penicillin. Many recovered, almost miraculously. The drug was so scarce that they recycled it from the patients' urine.
The fire got a lot of publicity, and the miracle cure following it made it memorable, even era defining.
There is no reason not to list the discovery of a method of producing penicillin.
A generation of libertines and deviants offers its gratitude.
My mom was born in Peoria, so that's something.
Also, a noted city for push-ups!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OuEOusBTYkE
So my question is, who thought of taking a moldy cantaloupe from a market and testing it for penicillin strains?
Penicillin was discovered before World War II, so the government and pharmaceutical companies were searching for natural products that had antibacterial action by World War II. Lewis Thomas, in his memoirs, was on Okinawa, and one of his colleagues took air samples every morning. He'd hold his petri dishes to the compass points and see what was in the air. He actually discovered a relatively weak antibiotic, but he was part of a worldwide program. (When his group of doctors went over the side in Okinawa, one of them was holding a cage of white lab rats in a cage. A jaded Marine sergeant remarked, "Now I've seen fucking everything." There's also a section on why you don't want nearsighted entomologists operating Browning automatics, but that's another story.)
This search is ongoing, and it isn't only pharmaceutical companies. Companies like IFF and Quest International send researchers out to search for fragrances and dyes. There are all kinds of amazing biological compounds out there.
Penicillin is not usually on lists of discoveries made during WWII
Funny, but I almost always associate the mass production of antibiotics as indeed being one of the war's key technological breakthroughs, along with radar, jet engines and atomic weapons.
Sulfa drugs (sulfonamide) were probably the most important antibiotic development through WW II.
This leaves out Howard Florey and his group in England. In the early 1930s, they were the ones who recognized the clinical promise of penicillin and developed the technology to mass produce it by cultivating the appropriate molds and methods for extraction and purification. There were animal tests but no human tests until the early 1940s during the war. Supposedly, Florey's team was reticent about using the drug on humans, but Fleming just grabbed a batch and tried it on a patient.
America stepped in for mass production, but the big antibiotic in use during the war was sulfinamide which had been developed in Germany in the early to mid-1930s. Medics were issued packets of the drug, and its use made a big difference in casualties. In the mid-1930s, Massengil, the douche company, produced a bad batch of sulfinamide that killed more than 100 people and led to reform of drug approval rules.
(There's a movie online about Florey's group Breaking the Mould. You can tell by the spelling that it's British.)
Penicillin was classified during WWII, to keep it out of German hands.
The Tuskeegee Untreated Syphillis Study was unethical, in part, because it continued long after there was a treatment for syphillis (penicillin), continuing until 1972:
https://www.cdc.gov/tuskegee/index.html