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Penicillin was one of the most important medical discoveries of the twentieth century. Penicillin was discovered by Alexander Flemming in September 1928 at the Saint Maryıs Hospital School in London. The ³Wonder Drug² Penicillin was discovered accidentally when Flemming removed the cover of a deadly bacteria that he had been studying. A mold had formed on the exposed culture, and Flemming would have thrown it out if he had not noticed something very peculiar about the mold, in the area surrounding the mold the bacterium was gone! Flemming kept the strain of mold alive and tested it on laboratory animals. He realized that this was a great thing, and could help fight many diseases. In 1929 he published a medical paper that proved how this mold was a powerful germ killer, yet would not damage skin tissue.
For years chemist were not able to extract enough pure concentrated Penicillin to use in medicine. Flemming kept his mold, but the world of science nearly forgot it. In 1938, ten years after Penicillinıs discovery, a group of scientist led by Howard Florey and Ernst B. Chain remembered about the paper. World War II interrupted research, but methods for mass production and purification of Penicillin were developed in the U.S. Flemming was knighted in 1944, an won the Nobel Peace Prize for Physiology or Medicine with Florey and Chain.
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