Life / Medicine

Antibiotics

Penicillin and its successors made bacterial infections treatable.

Alexander Fleming noticed in 1928 that a Penicillium mould killed bacteria; Howard Florey, Ernst Chain and colleagues purified penicillin and treated the first patients in 1941, and mass production began in 1943-44 (Nobel Prize 1945). Sulfa drugs (1935) and streptomycin (1943, the first effective drug against tuberculosis) followed. Antibiotics turned deadly pneumonia, wound infections and childbed fever into curable conditions and made chemotherapy and transplants feasible.