An exhibition to commemorate 75 years since the first human trials of penicillin (blog.wellcomelibrary.org)

I literally walk past this every day and I didn’t pay attention. Thank you for sorting my weekend outing!

My grandfather was a beneficiary of one of those early trials. After being shot down somewhere over Africa during WW2 he as treated with penicillin, had this have not happened then I would have never met him. I had to double-check the '75 years' to see if that was time accurate or the 'family tale' was wrong. Seems to add up.

Penicillin was discovered by accident in 1928 by Scottish scientist Alexander Fleming. The first cure by penicillin was in 1930, but it wasn't until well into 1942 that volume production and wide use began.

Note the 3d crystallographic model of penicillin. These were not meant to be exhibition pieces, it was what people used before interactive computer graphics for structure refinement. You had imperfect phases from somewhere and would calculate a Fourier map (perhaps only a projection along the axes as seen here), then you would construct your model and make it conform to the calculated density and chemical knowledge as best as you could, you'd measure atomic positions with calipers and from these derive new phases that you would feed into another cycle.

It's hard to believe that less than one human lifetime has elapsed between when a bad staph infection would almost certainly kill you, to a period when you could destroy most any bacterial infection, and now we're worried about being right back where we started. Evolution works fast, let's hope we can stay ahead in the arms race.