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This plaque on TQ2681 : St Mary's Hospital celebrates the undisputed discoverer of penicillin Sir Alexander Fleming. However according to my microbiology lecturer the story Fleming used to explain his discovery could not be the whole truth. Because of the nature of the action of penicillin in preventing cell division an agar plate will not be cleared of established colonies of bacteria after becoming inoculated with the precious mould.
The truth of the matter is probably that he came back from the bank holiday to find unused plates infected with the mould. True to the stereotype of the frugality of his ancestry he scraped off the mould and inoculated the plate to find the colonies would not grow where the mould had been. To cover up his blatant disregard for microbiological scientific protocol to use only sterile growing media he twisted the truth a bit. However it was the Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford who did the major work in creating a usable therapy. Fleming begged some penicillin from the Radcliffe for a dying patient who was successfully treated. One of St Mary’s sponsors was Lord Beaverbrook, he splashed the story all over his newspapers. Because of wartime expediency penicillin was developed commercially in the USA and the extraction process of the active ingredient from the mould was patented. The Radcliffe had to pay royalties on their development work because they didn’t patent them. In those days you couldn’t patent something that pre-existed in nature so St Mary’s had to pay to use their own discovery too.