The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 270 No 7255 p888
28 June 2003

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Letters to the Editor

Penicillin

The true chain of events

From Mrs A. Morant, MRPharmS

I do not think that anyone disputes Alexander Fleming's claim to the discovery of penicillin to which Mr K. A. Lees refers to in his letter (PJ, 7 June, p793). However, without the subsequent work by Florey and Chain (in which many others were involved) Fleming's 1929 paper on Penicillium notatum could well have languished on some bookshelf gathering dust to this day.

Even though Fleming suspected that this bacterium might be useful as an antiseptic, he was defeated by its instability. It was only in the late 1930s that, while carrying out a literature search on more than 200 antibacterial substances, Chain came across Fleming's paper. Subsequently, Florey and he undertook their penicillin study. In due course, the first clinical trials were carried out between February and June 1941 in the Radcliffe Infirmary, Oxford.

As the 1945 Nobel Prize for physiology and medicine was awarded jointly to Fleming, Florey and Chain, the latter two scientists must surely have done appreciably more than just "the development work" at Oxford.

Jean Medawar and David Pyke do much to debunk the mythology surrounding the discovery of penicillin in their book 'Hitler's gift: scientists who fled nazi Germany' and give credit where it is due:

"... In 1942 a friend of Alexander Fleming's was close to death in St Mary's Hospital, London, and the scientist asked Florey for a supply of the rare substance to save him. The 'wonder drug' did indeed work, and on 30 August its success was reported in The Times, followed next day by a letter from St Mary's which also claimed credit. The story went largely uncorrected by Florey, who unlike Fleming, was publicity-shy, and multiplied into a shoal of wildly inaccurate reports which claimed, among other things, that the first clinical trials had been held at St Mary's using penicillin sent in churns from Oxford. Florey, Chain and the William Dunn School of Pathology had vanished from the equation; and no amount of subsequent corrections managed to revise the generally recognized version, which became a popular myth."

This is a demonstration of the importance of setting the record straight, even if it means blowing one's own trumpet, if we are to maintain an accurate record of events. Hence, it is not a new phenomenon that spin, all to often, wins out over the truth.

Annette Morant
Edgware, Middlesex

Heatley improvised production methods

From Mr K. Brown

Further to the letter from Mr K. A. Lees (PJ , 7 June, p793) I write to confirm that penicillin was indeed discovered by Alexander Fleming at St Mary's Hospital in September 1928. However, there are other matters on which I must correct him. Fleming was not working on his earlier discovery lysozyme at that time, but was studying staphylococcal variation when one of his culture plates became contaminated by the fungus Penicillium notatum. It was not until 1941 that penicillin first came into systemic clinical use as a result of the work of a team at Oxford led by Howard Florey and including the biochemist Ernst Chain. The production methods improvised by Norman Heatley formed the foundation of British surface culture of penicillin throughout the 1939–45 war.

However, after the war, British pharmaceutical companies began to produce penicillin using fermentation techniques pioneered in the United States. These methods and the use of corn steep liquor as the best growth medium for penicillin-producing Penicillium species were developed at the US Department of Agriculture Northern Regional Research Laboratories at Peoria, Illinois, where Heatley went to work with Andrew Moyer. Heatley went on to work for Merck, but it was Pfizer that built the first fermentation plant at Brooklyn. Merck, however, did lead the way with the scale-up of streptomycin production in partnership with its discoverer Selman Waksman.

 Kevin Brown
Trust Archivist and Alexander Fleming Laboratory Museum Curator

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