1928Reputable sourceWell documented
Penicillin and the Antibiotic Era
On the timeline · around 1928 · The Modern Age
What happened
In 1928 the Scottish bacteriologist Alexander Fleming returned to his London lab to find that a mould had contaminated a bacterial culture and killed it. The mould, Penicillium, yielded the first true antibiotic — penicillin. Developed into a usable drug by Howard Florey and Ernst Chain in the early 1940s, it began saving lives during the Second World War.
Why it matters
Antibiotics gave humanity, for the first time, a reliable cure for the bacterial infections that had killed for all of history — from plague and tuberculosis to infected wounds. Fleming, Florey, and Chain shared the 1945 Nobel Prize.
Sources
- HISTORY. Penicillin discovered by Sir Alexander Fleming · Reputable source
Related timelines
- Medicine → — The dawn of antibiotics