someone in the lab said, why don't we try this mold idea from alexander fleming? amazingly, it only took a couple of months before they purified the penicillin. at this point, they needed to know is penicillin was effective. they tested it in mice and rats. they doped the mice. half were treated with penicillin. half were not treated. eight hours later, they started dropping, the untreated mice. they started dropping. the next day, all of the -- all ofpenicillin the untreated mice had died. all of the treated mice had survived. penicillin to take to the next level. he co-opted a doctor who would try therapy with penicillin. a policeman in london had gotten a scratch on his face. it had become infected. he was hospitalized. they performed surgery to try to cut out the infected area. he just kept getting worse. finally, when he was on his -- sorry,48-hours eight-hours to live, they said ok. bring on the penicillin. they did. they brought it in and started in fusing him. within four to five hours he was awake. the therapy went on for almost three days. out of thewere

alexander fleming had been a surgeon during world war i.w firsthand how much people were dying needlessly from infections. when the war was over, he went back to st. mary's, where he dedicated his life in the search for antibiotics. there is a rumor that he had to go out for a weekend in the countryside. i don't know if this is true or not. he left early on a friday afternoon. he did not finish washing up the dishes. he came back on monday. he started going through the dishes one by one. he noticed there was a growth on one of the plates. the bacteria were lysing around the colony of penicillin. he found it was sufficiently interesting. he isolated the fungus and tested it more. there was quite a bit of excitement. this was the first time antibiotics had been discovered. a very famous natural products chemist from london took up the next step, the isolation of work purification of penicillin. there is a mold called penicillium that makes penicillin, the chemical that saves lives. he worked on it for three years. to make a long story short,