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The Fallow Years. Having made his great discovery, Dr. Fleming went on to other work. He was engaged in many other experiments—no scientist knows just which of his bottles contains the Nobel Prize. In the history of penicillin there ensued eleven years almost as sterile as the area around the penicillium.
The hiatus might not have been so long if during that period Germany's Gerhard Domagk had not discovered sulfa drugs (TIME, Dec. 28, 1936), which began to save lives so dramatically that the experts dropped everything else to test them out. In 1933, Dr. Fleming himself lent a hand with M & B 693, also known as sulfapyridine. The sulfas almost seemed to be the dream drugs he had looked for. They stopped deadly streptococci, even cured pneumonia. But the more sulfa drugs were used, the clearer it became that they 1) sometimes delayed healing by irritating wound walls, 2) did not work well in serum or pus. When used internally, they can cause severe, sometimes fatal, toxic reactions (TIME, May 8).
The Practical Application. By 1938, when World War II loomed, a good internal and external antiseptic was still to seek. But at Oxford's Sir William Dunn School of Pathology (53 miles from Dr. Fleming's laboratory) the man who was to make Dr. Fleming's discovery save human lives was already at work on the problem. He was Dr. Howard Walter Florey, 45, an Australian-born professor of pathology. He organized a research team to study the practical extraction of capricious penicillin. The team included experts in chemistry, bacteriology, pathology and medicine. Among them : Mrs. Florey, who is also a doctor, and Dr. Ernst Boris Chain, a brilliant half-French, half-Russian enzyme chemist who shares with Dr. Florey the honors for developing penicillin.
Under Dr. Florey's dynamic super vision, the blue-green penicillium mold began to grow again. The researchers dis covered that the best growing temperature is about 75° F.,that the mold needs plenty of air. At first, Dr. Florey's researchers got only about a gram of reddish-brown powder (the sodium salt of penicillin —penicillin itself is an unstable acid) from 100 liters of the mold liquid. But at last, after heroic chemical cookery, they accumulated enough penicillin to test the drug on living creatures.
Of Mice and Men. Then eight mice were inoculated with a deadly strain of streptococci. Says Dr. Florey: "We sat up through the night injecting penicillin every three hours into the treated group [four mice]. I must confess that it was one of the more exciting moments when we found in the morning that all the untreated mice were dead and all the penicillin-treated ones alive." During that historic night, Dr. Fleming's vision turned into a medical reality.