TECHNOLOGY
The Mould That Killed Bacteria
1928 to 1945 CE
Phanerozoic · Cenozoic · Quaternary · Holocene · Meghalayan
A culture plate left uncovered showed bacteria dissolving in a ring around a spot of mould. Turning that observation into a medicine took another decade, a second laboratory and a wartime industrial effort; by 1945 penicillin was being made by the ton, and infections that had reliably killed stopped killing.
Why it matters
Life expectancy jumped, and evolution answered almost at once: resistant bacteria were reported while the drug was still new. It is natural selection on a scale anyone can watch, it is still running, and every course of antibiotics anybody takes is a round of it.
Dating & uncertainty
The observation dates from 1928 and the paper from 1929, well before the drug reached patients in quantity. Resistant bacteria were reported before the war was over.
Sources
- Fleming (2001), Bulletin of the World Health Organization · On the antibacterial action of cultures of a penicillium
- Hutchings, Truman & Wilkinson (2019), Current Opinion in Microbiology · Antibiotics: past, present and future
Earth history as one day
23:59:59.99811.9 ms before midnight
if Earth’s 4.54 billion years were compressed into a single day
See it on the timeline