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Entry 211 of 240Invention

The Discovery of Penicillin

1928 CE/British Isles/Britain
Today London, England (St Mary's Hospital)Span Antibiotic era · 1928 onward

Alexander Fleming returned from holiday to find mold had contaminated a petri dish and killed the bacteria around it. He published, and little happened for a decade until a team at Oxford worked out how to purify and mass-produce it, in time for the Second World War. Before antibiotics, a scratch could kill; afterward, infections that had killed for all of human history became a prescription. Together with sanitation and vaccination, it helped add decades to average life spans within a single generation.

◆ Worth knowingFleming warned in his Nobel lecture that careless use would breed resistant bacteria — he described antibiotic resistance in 1945, the year the drug went mainstream, and was right on schedule.
◆ The mechanismInformation-medium revolution

A new way to record or transmit information lowers the cost of copying ideas and reorders who holds knowledge and power.

Also: Pandemic · Demographic shock & recovery

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