[Owl558]

“What’s really interesting here is that this antibiotic came from bacteria...”

It’s a seminal breakthrough that gives us a whole new way of looking at antibiotic chemistry. Real Nobel Prize stuff, if that still means anything. We get to go back and search other coastal areas for variations of this molecule.

“Penicillin was discovered accidentally in an old mold culture by Alexander Fleming.”

If I remember the story, he became interested in a blue mold growing on some orange peels left out near a window.

(and if that isn’t the story, it should be :)

[neverdem]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Fleming#Accidental_discovery

[Hiddigeigei]

“What’s really interesting here is that this antibiotic came from bacteria...”

Streptomycin the first antibiotic remedy for tuberculosis was first isolated from the actinobacterium Streptomyces griseus on October 19, 1943, by Albert Schatz, a graduate student, in the laboratory of Selman Abraham Waksman at Rutgers University.