Meet the penicillin pushers

They're in our omelettes and stir-fries, on our grocery lists.

- Swetha Sivakumar

We don't often think of fungi in pharma, but that is, of course, where penicillin comes from.

The antibiotic substance earned three of its discoverers — Alexander Fleming, Howard Florey and Ernst Boris Chain — the 1945 Nobel in Medicine. But I want to tell you the fascinating story of why that list should have been longer. (When will the Nobel committee do away with this unfair rule of threes?)

It all began, as we know, with Fleming, a Scottish bacteriologist at St Mary's Hospital in London. He ran a lab there that was famously messy. He even used the mess to create art. He carefully arranged different bacterial species in petri dishes, then left for the day or weekend and returned excited to see the colourful designs they had formed.

At one point in the 1920s, he returned to find that some petri dishes he'd left unwashed now housed a blue-green fungal mold. And, he noticed, there were no bacterial colonies around this mold.

The green stuff, he realised, had anti-bacterial properties.