WWII Science & Technology: The Race That Changed Everything - Part 3: Penicillin's Paradox: How Bureaucracy Almost Killed the Miracle Drug

The Thirteen-Year Wait

In 1928, Alexander Fleming returned from vacation to find mold growing on his petri dishes. Around the mold, bacteria had died. He had discovered antibiotics.

In 1941, penicillin finally saved its first patient.

Thirteen years. Think about what that means.

Every soldier who died of infected wounds between 1928 and 1941—every child who died of strep throat, every mother who died of childbed fever—died waiting for a discovery that already existed.

The science was done. The delay was institutional.

The Discovery: September 3, 1928

The story is famous, almost mythical. Fleming, a Scottish bacteriologist at St. Mary’s Hospital in London, was studying staphylococcus bacteria. He went on vacation without properly storing his cultures.

When he returned, one dish was contaminated with mold—Penicillium notatum, blown in through an open window. Around the mold, the staph bacteria had dissolved.

“That’s funny.”
— Alexander Fleming’s reported first words upon seeing the discovery

Fleming was a good enough scientist to recognize significance. He isolated the mold, named its antibacterial secretion “penicillin,” and published his findings in the British Journal of Experimental Pathology in 1929.

And then… essentially nothing.

Why Fleming Didn’t Save the World

Here’s the part of the story that doesn’t make it into the heroic retellings.

Fleming tried to purify penicillin for about two years. When it proved difficult and unstable, he gave up. He returned to his previous research on antiseptics.

Why? Several reasons, all of them institutional:

1. Fleming was a microbiologist, not a chemist. Purifying penicillin required biochemistry skills his laboratory didn’t have. He could have collaborated with chemists—but didn’t pursue it aggressively.

2. No one was funding antibiotic research. The British medical establishment didn’t believe in it. The Therapeutic Research Corporation, founded specifically to develop promising drugs, showed no interest.

3. Antiseptics were the establishment position. Joseph Lister had revolutionized surgery with antiseptics. The medical establishment believed the problem of infection was “solved.” Antibiotics seemed unnecessary.

4. Penicillin was hard. It degraded quickly, couldn’t be stored, and was incredibly difficult to produce in quantities. Why solve hard problems when easier problems paid the bills?

For a decade, penicillin gathered dust.

The Oxford Team: Florey and Chain

If the story ended with Fleming, penicillin would be a footnote in medical history. But in 1939, two refugees gave it life.

Howard Florey was an Australian pathologist at Oxford, quietly brilliant and terrible at self-promotion.

Ernst Chain was a Jewish biochemist who had fled Nazi Germany. He was brilliant, temperamental, and obsessed with enzymes.

They found Fleming’s 1929 paper and decided to investigate. Chain, the chemist Fleming lacked, figured out how to purify and stabilize penicillin.

By May 1940, they had enough to test on mice. Eight mice were given lethal doses of streptococcus. Four received penicillin.

The untreated mice died within 24 hours. The treated mice lived.

The First Human Trial: February 1941

Albert Alexander was a 43-year-old police constable who had scratched his face on a rose thorn. The scratch became infected. The infection spread. By the time he reached Florey, half his face had been eaten away.

On February 12, 1941, he received the first injection of penicillin ever given to a human patient.

Within 24 hours, his fever broke. Within days, his eye was healing. It was a miracle.

Then the penicillin ran out.

They had produced all the penicillin in the world, and it wasn’t enough to save one man. Florey’s team even extracted unmetabolized penicillin from Alexander’s urine to reinject it.

It wasn’t enough. The infection returned. Alexander died on March 15, 1941.

The drug worked. They just couldn’t make enough of it.

The British Failure

Florey went to every pharmaceutical company in Britain. None were interested.

To be fair, Britain in 1941 had other problems. The Blitz was destroying cities. German invasion seemed imminent. The pharmaceutical industry was struggling to produce existing drugs.

But the deeper problem was institutional. British pharmaceutical companies were small, conservative, and unaccustomed to the kind of industrial-scale production penicillin would require.

The Rockefeller Foundation, an American philanthropy, offered to fund development—but only if Florey came to America.

In June 1941, with German U-boats patrolling the Atlantic, Florey and his colleague Norman Heatley flew to the United States with penicillin mold samples hidden in their coat linings.

The American Miracle

What happened next shows what bureaucracy-free urgency looks like.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s laboratory in Peoria, Illinois, took on the production challenge. Within months, they had:

1. Changed the growing medium. Corn steep liquor (a waste product from corn processing) increased penicillin yield 10-fold.

2. Found a better mold. Lab assistant Mary Hunt scoured local markets for moldy produce. A cantaloupe from a Peoria grocery store yielded Penicillium chrysogenum, which produced 200 times more penicillin than Fleming’s original strain.

3. Developed deep-tank fermentation. Instead of growing mold on surfaces, they submerged it in giant tanks—industrial-scale production.

4. Coordinated industrial production. By 1943, 21 American companies were producing penicillin, coordinated by the War Production Board.

5. Prioritized military use. Every batch went to the military until supply exceeded demand.

The results were staggering.

The Production Miracle

By D-Day in June 1944, there was enough penicillin for every Allied soldier who needed it. The infection death rate, which had been 18% in WWI, dropped to less than 1%.

“Thanks to penicillin, he will come home!”
— American WWII propaganda poster

The Credit War

After the war, Alexander Fleming became one of the most famous people in the world. He received the Nobel Prize (shared with Florey and Chain), a knighthood, and celebrity status that followed him everywhere.

Florey and Chain received… considerably less attention.

Fleming did little to correct the imbalance. He accepted the role of sole discoverer gracefully, even though he knew Florey’s team had done the work that actually saved lives.

Chain was particularly bitter about this. He had fled Nazi persecution, devoted years to the penicillin problem, and watched Fleming receive the credit.

“The impression is that Florey and I grubbingly followed up Fleming’s grubbery, whereas in fact Fleming abandoned penicillin after his grubbering.”
— Ernst Chain, in a letter to a colleague

The public wanted a simple story: one genius, one discovery, one miracle. The complex truth—that discovery without development is worthless—didn’t fit the narrative.

The Uncomfortable Truth About War and Medicine

Here’s the thing no one wants to say:

War is great for medical progress.

Not because war is good (it isn’t). But because war does something that peacetime institutions resist with every fiber of their being: it removes bureaucratic obstacles.

In peacetime:

• Clinical trials take years
• Funding committees require endless justification
• Companies avoid “risky” projects
• Regulatory approval is slow and cautious
• Academic credit allocation discourages collaboration

In wartime:

• Soldiers are dying; approval is instant
• Government funds anything that might help
• Companies are forced to collaborate by the War Production Board
• The FDA fast-tracks everything
• Everyone shares information because lives depend on it

The same drug, the same science, the same people—but wartime urgency accomplished in two years what peacetime complacency couldn’t accomplish in thirteen.

The Modern Parallel

Today, we face a different crisis: antibiotic resistance. Bacteria are evolving faster than we can develop new antibiotics. The “post-antibiotic era” is approaching.

And the pharmaceutical industry has largely abandoned antibiotic research.

Why? The same reasons as 1929:

• Antibiotics aren’t profitable. You take them for a week, then stop. Chronic disease drugs are more lucrative.
• Development is hard and risky. Many candidates fail in trials.
• The problem seems “solved.” Until it suddenly isn’t.

We are living in a slow-motion repeat of the 1930s. The science exists. The need is desperate. The institutions are failing.

Only this time, there’s no war to force urgency.

The Lesson

The penicillin story isn’t about one man’s genius or one mold’s magic. It’s about systems.

Peacetime systems are designed to minimize risk. They add review boards and approval processes and funding committees. These aren’t bad things—they prevent harmful drugs from reaching patients and wasteful spending on dead ends.

But these same systems create a bias toward doing nothing. They punish bold action and reward cautious inaction. They generate thirteen-year gaps between discovery and implementation.

Penicillin’s paradox is this: the institutions designed to advance medicine were the primary obstacles to advancing medicine. It took the outside shock of total war to break the paralysis.

How many penicillins are sitting in petri dishes right now, waiting for a crisis that forces action?

Conclusion

Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin. Howard Florey and Ernst Chain made it work. American industry made it available.

And bureaucracy almost killed it in the cradle.

The mold on Fleming’s petri dish was a gift from nature. The thirteen-year delay was a gift from institutions that valued caution over courage.

The miracle isn’t that penicillin was discovered. The miracle is that it survived its discoverers.

This post is part of the WWII Science series, exploring how wartime pressures transformed technology and ethics forever.