Penicillin: The Greatest Human Invention

One foggy Sunday morning in 1928, Sarah McElroy Fleming was cleaning out the refrigerator, opened an old jar of haggis, and through her revulsion, began to scream.

"Take it away! Take it away!” she cried as her husband came running.

Mrs. Fleming shuddered and gagged. She pushed the jar into Dr. Fleming’s able hands. He peered inside. “My lovely wife has been completely immobilized by a simple, though colorful mold," he observed. Fascinated, he began to poke at the specimen.

It was thick and spongy from feasting on Scotland’s national dare-you-to-eat-it food. Arranged in concentric circles, the mold was forest green, grassy green, black, and white. The doctor’s mind began to work. “Women are delicate and weak compared to man and beast. And yet, they are stronger than the common cold…” He looked more intently into his accidental Petri dish. The wheels were turning.

Suddenly, they locked into place. “Eureka!” the good doctor exclaimed, “You are a fine woman, Sarah, and if this simple mold can incapacitate you, then surely it can kill the lesser species that cause scarlet fever, pneumonia and mengitis!"

Clutching the jar, he kissed Sarah’s cheek and made a dash for his lab. The rest, as they say, is history.

Unfortunately, I’m allergic to penicillin, so I have to admire this incredible bit of human ingenuity from the other side of the pharmacy counter (though I do sometimes wonder if I could eat the green fuzz straight from the refrigerator and still avoid anaphylactic shock).

Penicillin is so well documented that I can, while driving, download its history, pharmacology and chemical structure from the mobile Web on my cell phone.

So I ask with all earnestness: if we happen to sever our digital umbilical cord and lose access to the documentation of the greatest scientific discovery of all time, will human kind ever again put two and two together and come up with mold as the for cure for raging, Gram-positive infections (and the unmentionable Gram-negative, gonorrhea)?