Penicillin

In Our Time: Science

BBC

History

4.5 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 9 June 2016

⏱️ 47 minutes

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Summary

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss penicillin, discovered by Alexander Fleming in 1928. It is said he noticed some blue-green penicillium mould on an uncovered petri dish at his hospital laboratory, and that this mould had inhibited bacterial growth around it. After further work, Fleming filtered a broth of the mould and called that penicillin, hoping it would be useful as a disinfectant. Howard Florey and Ernst Chain later shared a Nobel Prize in Medicine with Fleming, for their role in developing a way of mass-producing the life-saving drug. Evolutionary theory predicted the risk of resistance from the start and, almost from the beginning of this 'golden age' of antibacterials, scientists have been looking for ways to extend the lifespan of antibiotics. With Laura Piddock Professor of Microbiology at the University of Birmingham Christoph Tang Professor of Cellular Pathology and Professorial Fellow at Exeter College at the University of Oxford And Steve Jones Emeritus Professor of Genetics at University College, London Producer: Simon Tillotson.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Thank you for downloading this episode of In Our Time, for more details about in our time, and for our terms of use please go to BBC.co.uk.
0:08.0	UK. I hope you enjoy the program.
0:10.0	Hello, in 1928 the Scottish bacteriologist Alexander Fleming
0:14.8	noticed something odd on the Petri dish he'd left out in his laboratory
0:18.1	St Mary's Hospital, Paddington. The dish was covered with bacteria as expected except for one area around some mold.
0:25.0	He realized that something coming from the mold had killed bacteria.
0:29.0	Fleming named the mold's active substance Penicillin. He won a Nobel Prize of Medicine for his discovery
0:35.1	in 1945 along with Howard Florian Ernest Chain, who had seen the potential for Penicillin
0:41.0	and turned it into the life-saving drug it became.
0:44.3	From that point on, scientists try to understand how penicillin does what it does, and from
0:49.1	there to find new antibiotics to kill a broader range of bacteria and deal with the ever-present
0:54.4	threat of drug resistance. With me to discuss penicillin are Laura Piduc,
0:58.2	professor of microbiology at the University of Birmingham, Christoph Tang, Professor of Cellular Pathology and
1:05.0	Professor at Exeter College at the University of Oxford, and Steve Jones, a Maritus
1:10.3	Professor of Genetics at University College London.
1:13.2	Steve Jones, before the 20th century,
1:15.6	what did doctors use when they tried to kill bacteria?
1:20.0	Guesswork, I think is the word. People have known about fevers of course for a long time and the
1:26.6	assumption was it was an imbalance in body chemistry in the famous four humors and the assumption of a fever was you had too much
1:34.1	collar too much blood. So what would you do it was the universal remedy it was the
1:38.6	penicillin of its day you did bloodletting you took a lot of blood out. Now that probably did no good at all. In fact, it probably did more harm than good.
1:47.0	There were some treatments in early times that probably did some good. People used to dress wounds with honey, which seems an odd thing to do,
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