The Discovery of Penicillin

1928 CE — British Isles, Britain

Today: London, England (St Mary's Hospital)

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 knowing: Fleming 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.

Pattern: Information-medium revolution — A new way to record or transmit information lowers the cost of copying ideas and reorders who holds knowledge and power.

Entry 211 of 240 in Precedent, a walk through the whole human story in order.