The importance of Fleming ’s discovery was that it led to penicillin, the first
successful chemotherapeutic agent produced by a microbe, thus initiating the
golden age of the wonder drugs. However, the road to the development of penicillin
as a successful drug was not an easy one. For a decade, it remained as a laboratory
curiosity, and an unstable curiosity at that. Attempts to isolate penicillin were
made in the 1930s by a number of British chemists, but the instability of the
substance frustrated their efforts. When World War II arrived and many British
soldiers were dying on the battlefield from bacterial infections after being wounded,
a study of penicillin began in 1939 at the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology
of the University of Oxford by Howard W. Florey (Figure 1.4 ), Ernst B. Chain
(Figure 1.5 ), Norman Heatley (Figure 1.6 ), Edward Abraham, and their colleagues.
This effort led to the successful preparation of a stable form of penicillin and the
demonstration of its remarkable antibacterial activity and lack of toxicity in mice.