First Antibiotic Used on a Human
Sulfonamide antibiotics were first used successfully to treat a human bacterial infection
December 26, 1932
A Chance Discovery That Saved Millions
In September 1928, Scottish bacteriologist Alexander Fleming returned to his London laboratory after a vacation to find that a mold had contaminated one of his petri dishes containing Staphylococcus bacteria. Rather than discarding the dish, he noticed that the mold — Penicillium notatum — had killed the surrounding bacteria. Fleming published his findings in 1929, calling the substance penicillin. He recognized its potential but struggled to produce it in useful quantities, and his discovery sat largely dormant for over a decade.
From Discovery to Life-Saving Drug
In the late 1930s, Oxford scientists Howard Florey and Ernst Chain took up Fleming's work and succeeded in purifying and producing penicillin in quantities sufficient for animal and human testing. In February 1941, the first human patient — a policeman near death from a bacterial infection — was treated with penicillin and began to recover dramatically. He died when the supply ran out, but the trial proved penicillin worked. Mass production, aided by American pharmaceutical companies during World War II, saved hundreds of thousands of soldiers' lives by treating infected wounds.
The Antibiotic Age and Its Limits
Fleming, Florey, and Chain shared the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1945. Penicillin launched the antibiotic age, leading to the development of dozens of other antibiotics that transformed medicine. Diseases that had been death sentences — pneumonia, scarlet fever, syphilis, and many wound infections — became treatable. However, Fleming warned from the beginning about antibiotic resistance, a problem that now threatens to reverse much of the progress made. Antimicrobial resistance is one of the greatest public health challenges of the 21st century. Check how long we've had antibiotics.