April 5, 1943: The Penicillin Committee

April 5, 1943: The British War Cabinet sets up the Penicillin Committee, leading to the mass production of the antibiotic penicillin.

On September 3, 1928, at St. Mary's Hospital (now part of Imperial College) in London, Scottish physician Alexander Fleming observed that fungal contamination of a bacterial culture, Staphylococcus aureus, appeared to kill the bacteria. He confirmed this observation with a new experiment on September 28. He published his experiment in 1929, and called the antibacterial substance (the fungal extract) penicillin.

Fleming expressed initial optimism that penicillin would be a useful antiseptic, because of its high potency and minimal toxicity in comparison to other antiseptics of the day, and noted its laboratory value in the isolation of Bacillus influenzae (now called Haemophilus influenzae).

Fleming did not convince anyone that his discovery was important. This was largely because penicillin was so difficult to isolate that its development as a drug seemed impossible. It is speculated that, had Fleming been more successful at making other scientists interested in his work, penicillin would possibly have been developed years earlier.

In 1940, Australian scientist Howard Florey and a University of Oxford team of researchers, including Ernst Chain, made progress in making concentrated penicillin from fungal culture broth that showed both in vitro and in vivo bactericidal action.

The first successful use of pure penicillin was in 1942 when Fleming cured Harry Lambert of an infection of the nervous system, streptococcal meningitis, which would otherwise have been fatal. By that time, the Oxford team could produce only a small amount. Florey willingly gave the only available sample to Fleming. Lambert showed improvement from the very next day of the treatment, and was completely cured within a week.

Fleming published his clinical trial in the medical journal The Lancet in 1943. This convinced the British War Cabinet to set up the Penicillin Committee. Unlike every war before it, including the American Civil War and World War I, wound infections that might have doomed a soldier could be treated and cured. Australia was the first country to make the drug available for civilian use. In the U.S., penicillin was made available to the general public on March 15, 1945. Fleming, Florey, and Chain shared the 1945 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the development of penicillin.

Fleming was knighted in 1944, and lived until 1955; Florey, until 1968; Chain, until 1979.

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April 5, 1943 was a Monday. Actor Max Gail, famous for his portrayal of New York Police Detective Stanley "Wojo" Wojciehowicz on the 1975-82 ABC sitcom Barney Miller, was born on this day.

Baseball was in Spring Training. Football was out of season. The NBA hadn't been founded yet. And the Stanley Cup Finals was between Games 2 and 3. The Detroit Red Wings went on to a 4-game sweep of the Boston Bruins. So there were no scores on this historic day.