The scratch has gone red and we're just waiting now

The doctor looked at his arm and told us to keep it clean. That was Tuesday. — Mother of three, 1936

Somebody noticed a mold that killed bacteria in 1928, and then it sat for a decade because nobody could make enough of it. In February 1941 a team at Oxford finally gave some to a policeman with a bad infection. They had so little that they pulled it back out of his urine and gave it to him again. He started getting better. Then they ran out. That's how close it was.

Noted: the mold behind penicillin by the ton came off a cantaloupe from a market in Peoria, Illinois. Commercial strains still descend from it.

The full file

The policeman was Albert Alexander, a constable, 43. The story you'll usually hear is that he scratched himself on a rose thorn. He didn't. He was hurt in a German air raid on Southampton in November 1940, and his daughter said so. He got his first dose on February 12, 1941, and died on March 15.

Making enough of it took the Americans. In 1941 Pfizer bought an empty ice plant in Brooklyn and grew the mold in deep tanks. By 1944 it was the biggest maker in the world, and most of the penicillin that went ashore on D-Day was Pfizer's.

Fleming saw the next problem coming. In his Nobel lecture in December 1945 he warned that once anybody could buy penicillin in a shop, people would take too little of it and breed germs it couldn't kill. Finish the bottle. He said so back in 1945.

Relates to No. 00300.