TE būs pilnīgāks stāsts
"Contamination of bacterial cultures by moulds takes place all the
time. In 1871 Sir John Burdon Sanderson reported that moulds of the
Penicillium group would prevent the development of bacteria in a
broth exposed to the air. In 1872 Joseph Lister established that the
growth of Penicillium glaucum would kill off bacteria in a liquid
culture. He at once saw the possible clinical application of the phenomenon.
He wrote to his brother saying ‘Should a suitable case
present, I shall endeavour to employ Penicillium glaucum and observe if
the growth of the organisms be inhibited in the human tissues.’ He
never published his results, so we do not know how far and how long
he pursued the question, but we do know that in 1884 a patient of
Lister’s, a young nurse, was suffering from an infected wound. Various
chemical antiseptics were tried without success, and then a new substance
was used. She was so astonished and so grateful at her seemingly
miraculous cure that she asked Lister’s registrar to write the
name of this substance in her scrap-book. It was penicillium. Why did
Lister keep this success to himself? There is, I think, only one possible
explanation. Throughout the 1870s and 1880s he was struggling to
win acceptance for the principle of antiseptic surgery. He lacked the
energy or the resources to embark on a new campaign while the
germ theory itself remained so widely contested.
In 1895 Vincenzo Tiberio in Naples injected extracts of penicillium moulds into infected animals, the experiment ‘first’ performed by
Florey and Chain in 1940, though his results were nothing like as
striking as theirs. In 1897, a young French army doctor called Duchesne
described similar experiments in a thesis. His preliminary results
were certainly striking; unfortunately he died of tuberculosis before
he could carry out further trials. Fleming was blissfully ignorant of all
this previous work. Had he known of it he might have been less quick
to claim the credit for the discovery of a new substance."

Stāsti tur ir visiem. Vēl arī jāpiemin, ka stāsti parasti rodas pēc tam (kā ar Ņūtona ābolu) Cik sapratu, Flemins arī nebija īsti ieinteresēts jautājumā par to, kas ar to penicilīnu ir darāms. Viņa prāts bija aizņemts ar vakcīnām.
"Although Fleming recognized that penicillin might possibly have
a therapeutic use, he was far too interested in the production of
vaccines to waste much time exploring the possibility. A few discouraging
findings, and he dropped all work on it. He was also quite
uninterested in the problem of how to produce purer, stronger samples
of his new drug. Two students of his, Ridley and Craddock, did
astonishingly able work, under horribly primitive conditions..."