September 28, 2026: A Mess That Became Medicine

Podcast: bsnsHistory · bsnsBasics

Opublikowano: 2026-09-28

Alexander Fleming almost threw the dish away. On September 28, 1928, the London bacteriologist returned from a two week vacation to find a stray mold had wiped out the staph bacteria in one forgotten petri dish, the accidental discovery that would eventually become penicillin, the world's first antibiotic. Fleming published his findings the next year to almost no attention, and the discovery sat mostly dormant for a decade until Oxford researchers Howard Florey and Ernst Chain purified it into something usable, then hit a wall trying to produce it at scale. The breakthrough that solved that problem came from...