1928

Fleming discovers penicillin, but cannot purify his “mold juice.” His assistants F. Ridley and S. R. Craddock, to whom he assigned the task of producing it in quantities to supply his experiments and to find out something of its chemical properties, found it to be soluble in alcohol, and thus unlikely to be either a protein or an enzyme like lysozyme (Macfarlane, 124-26). Publishes first paper on penicillin in J. Experimental Pathology in May 1929, where he mentions its potential medical use (Wainwright, 14ff.).