Have you ever taken penicillin, or has any of the people you know ever taken it? Most people would probably say that they have never even heard of it, while others are still on the face of this Earth because of it. Penicillin is a type of medicine, which is arguably one of the biggest medical discoveries of all time, as it is vividly stated in the fifth paragraph of, “Not-So-Dumb Luck”, and it was created in the hands of an accident. The events that have led to the discovery and development of penicillin are, a bacteriologist by the name of Alexander Fleming and his left-behind mess in 1928, and Dr. Howard Florey and three colleagues at Oxford University that tested penicillin.
To begin with, one of the key events that led to the discovery and development of penicillin was an act of messiness and laziness by a bacteriologist named Alexander Fleming. After Alexander Fleming left on a month-long vacation in 1928, he left a huge mess in his …show more content…
Howard Florey and three colleagues of his at Oxford University tested penicillin in 1939. According to the source “The History of Penicillin” the author states, “ It was not until 1939 that Dr. Howard Florey, a future Nobel Laureate, and three colleagues at Oxford University began intensive research and were able to demonstrate penicillin’s ability to kill infectious bacteria.” This means that it wasn’t until 11 years later that penicillin was actually revealed to be a cure to infectious bacteria or diseases. Although Alexander Fleming initially discovered it by accident and didn’t even know what it was capable of curing, it took over a decade for someone actually tested it and proved of its capabilities. Howard Florey was the one to put this new medicine to the test and got the results needed to conclude that the fungus, Penicillium notatum, is in fact a cure for infectious bacteria and it can be used as a