Antibiotics

technology · earth · Britain first; now global

Compounds that kill or inhibit bacteria at concentrations tolerable to the patient. Alexander Fleming noticed in September 1928 that a Penicillium mould contaminating a staphylococcus plate at St Mary's Hospital, London, had cleared the bacteria around it, and published the observation in 1929; it went essentially nowhere for a decade. What made penicillin a drug was the Oxford work of Howard Florey, Ernst Chain and Norman Heatley, who purified enough to protect mice in May 1940 and treated the first patient, the policeman Albert Alexander, in February 1941 — he improved dramatically, then relapsed and died when the supply ran out. The sulphonamides had preceded penicillin from 1935. Antibiotics arrived after the largest part of the mortality decline had already happened, which is the historical detail most often reversed in popular accounts: they consolidated a decline that sanitation and nutrition had begun. Resistance now erodes the gain, and no comparable new class has entered routine practice for decades.