Penicillin
A Serendipity Story
Serendipity Stories bring the practice of serendipity to life in real-world examples.
In September 1928, Alexander Fleming returned to his cluttered laboratory at St. Mary's Hospital in London after a family vacation. As he sorted through stacks of Petri dishes containing his bacterial cultures, something unusual caught his eye. One of his culture plates had accidentally been left uncovered near an open window while he was away and was contaminated with a bluish-green mold.
What intrigued Fleming was the clear zone surrounding the mold where no Staphylococcus bacteria could grow – as if the mold was secreting something that killed the bacteria.
Fleming recognized the potential significance of his discovery. He isolated the mold, identified it as belonging to the Penicillium genus, and conducted initial experiments showing that this "mold juice" (as he first called it) could kill various disease-causing bacteria.
He published his findings in 1929, but the challenges of isolating and stabilizing the active compound proved daunting. Without the resources or chemical expertise to pursue this line of research further, Fleming's work on penicillin languished for a decade.
The story might have ended there if not for World War II. In 1938, driven by the urgent need to treat infected war wounds, a team led by Howard Florey and Ernst Chain at Oxford University began searching for promising antibacterial compounds.
When they discovered Fleming's nearly forgotten papers on Penicillin, they recognized its potential importance. Their team developed innovative methods to grow the mold in quantity, extract the active compound, and purify it into a stable form.
By 1941, they had produced enough penicillin to conduct the first human clinical trials. The first patient was a policeman who had developed a life-threatening infection from a thorn scratch. His remarkable recovery helped convince the U.S. government to support the mass production of penicillin for the war effort.
In 1945, Fleming, Florey, and Chain shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their contributions. Their work launched the modern age of antibiotics, saving countless lives and fundamentally changing the practice of medicine.
Many factors are at play here:
Fleming didn’t clean his Petri dishes before his time off, allowing and enabling the unexpected.
He was open to what happened in them while he was away. He could have ignored the mold or the ‘clear zone’ surrounding it. (He could have cleaned them out without looking at them.)
He was interested in what he saw; he considered it and made new connections between things that weren’t previously connected.
He pursued it, researching and publishing what he found.
This allowed Chain and Florey to pick up where he left off and pursue it, adding their expertise, insights, and perspectives.
This is an excellent example of how seeking, encountering, connecting, and activating can create a positive and valuable outcome.