Penicillin: the Oxford story

When Howard Florey came to Oxford in 1935 as the newly appointed Professor of Pathology, he arrived to state of the art but largely empty labs in the new Sir William Dunn School . He soon set about recruiting a research team and - by the early war years - Florey, Ernst Chain and others had turned over the department to making penicillin and demonstrating how effective it could be against bacterial infections. Penicillin then seemed nothing short of miraculous, banishing many infectious diseases that were some of the leading killers of the time. Indeed the work of the Oxford team ushered in the modern age of antibiotics. It is 70 years since Florey - together with Norman Heatley and Jim Kent - carried out a crucial experiment which showed the clear potential of penicillin for the first time. On the 25th May 1940, eight mice were infected with lethal doses of streptococci bacteria. Four of the mice were then given injections of penicillin.