The History of Antibiotics

Dr. Alexander Fleming was the first person to discover penicillin in 1928. However, it wasn’t until 1939 that Howard Florey and Earnest Chain started developing penicillin into a drug. In 1943, a lab worker named Mary Hunt found a strain of mold that yielded an especially high amount of penicillin. Florey and Chain mutated the mold she discovered to further increase the yield and by 1944, they were able to supply penicillin to injured WWII soldiers. Then in March of 1945, the first doses became available to the public. Since then, many more antibiotics have been discovered that have saved countless lives.