Encounter 07 · 07 of 42 · September 1928
The uninvited guest
A staphylococcal plate spoiled. The spoilage was interesting. Nobody, that September, knew it as a medicine.
St Mary’s Hospital, London
The dish is ordinary. The mold is not gilded.
In September 1928, in a laboratory at St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington, a culture plate of staphylococci was contaminated with a mold. Around the mold the bacteria had lysed.
What they knew
- Fleming noticed and kept the plate.
- He identified the mold as a Penicillium and published in 1929 in the British Journal of Experimental Pathology.
- The paper did not produce a drug. Hospitals did not change that year because of it.
What they could not know
- Whether the lysis would be repeatable, useful, purifiable, or safe.
- That Howard Florey, Ernst Chain, Norman Heatley and others at Oxford would, from 1939, turn a curiosity into a wartime medicine.
Chance, in English, still remembers a fall. A spore landed. Fleming looked. That is the whole 1928 event, if we refuse to let 1941 into the room too early.
He kept the plate. He identified a Penicillium. He published a short paper in 1929. Hospitals did not change that year because of it. Howard Florey, Ernst Chain, Norman Heatley and others at Oxford would, from 1939, turn a curiosity into a wartime medicine. Those names are another story. They must not be used to make the spore look hired.
An unlikely event does not become destiny merely because it mattered afterward. Other plates have been contaminated. Other mold has been ignored. This Guide will not pretend the universe was trying to invent a pharmaceutical company.
What was at stake
At the bench: a spoiled experiment and an observation. Later stakes (infection, war, industry) were not yet attached.
The next move
He wrote it down. The world mostly went on. The later work is another story, with other people, and must not be used to make the spore look hired.
What they had
- A window
- A habit of looking at plates others would have thrown
- A journal that would take a short paper
What happened
Penicillin became a drug in other hands, more than a decade later. Fleming is famous because of that later success. The September morning did not contain it.
What do we owe an accident that is only later useful?
Private. No one else will see it.