In 1928, Alexander Fleming, a scottish doctor and scientist, was working at
a hospital in london. He was trying to find ways to fight bacteria. At that
time many people died because of bacterial infections; sometimes from very
small cuts
Fleming was studying a dangerous bacteria called staphylococci. He was in a
hurry because he was going to go on holiday, so heforgot to wash all his
equipment in the labarotry before he left. There was one dis in which
staphylococci was growing. When fleming came back from holiday a few weeks
later, he noticed that there was something in the dish. He didn't know what the
thing was, but saw that it was stopping the harmful staphylococci bacteria from
growing. Fleming called it penicillin. He knew that penicillin could be an
important discovery, and so he did some experiments with it. However, Fleming
was not a chemist and he found it diffucult to make pure penicillin. He asked
some scientific colleagues to help him. but nobody seemed interested in
producing penicillin. Flemin had to wait more than ten years before two
brillant scientists, Howard Florey and Ernst Chain finally found and easy way
to produce the drug.
By May 1940, Florey's research team had enough penicillin
to experiment with animals for the first time. In a simple experiment they gave
a dangerous bacteria to eight mice. One hour later, They gave penicillin to
only four of the mice. After a few hours the four mice with penicillin were
fine, bu the other four were all dead! When Florey heard of the result the next
day he said, ''It looks like a miracle!''During World War II penicillin saved many lives, an in 1945 Fleming, Florey
and Chain won the Nobel Prize for medicine.
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