The Mould in Dr Florey's Coat
by Eric Lax
Little, Brown $220
How easy it is to forget that, until a few decades ago, an injury as undaunting as a scratch from a rose thorn was all too often the prelude to a gruesome death. This is the story of the difficult birth of the first antibiotic, penicillin, and the people who turned the eponymous green mould into the most miraculous drug yet discovered.
Surprisingly, the famous Scottish Nobel laureate Sir Alexander Fleming plays a minor and undistinguished role in this tale, and the legend of his famous contaminated Petri dish is swiftly debunked. A small band of little-known English scientists, led by an Australian, and a large group of American entrepreneurs receive the bulk of the kudos from author Eric Lax.
The development of penicillin was essentially a war effort. With a miniscule budget, a team of Oxford University researchers struggled unsuccessfully during the 1930s to produce workable quantities of the mystery chemical. At that time, septicaemia was a leading cause of death, and every hospital had a ward for chronic bacterial infections.
