What if Fleming had a cleaner laboratory

[Peter Cowan]

Legend has it that Fleming accidentally discovered the anti-bacterial properties of the Penicillium mould due to an accidental contamination of a petri dish.

What if his lab had been a bit cleaner and the mould hadn't contaminated the dish ?

Would the idea of antibiotics from natural sources have occurred to anybody in the 1930s / 1940s or would the search for anti-bacterials have continued solely amongst chemicals like Sulphonamides ?

What would have been the impact on society - for example; Penicillins were to a large extent responsible for the almost total eradication of Sexually transmitted diseases (at least until the development of resistant strains in the 1990s).

 

[Chrispi]

I'm sure that bacteriophages (viruses) would be more popular, as they are in the (former) Soviet Union.

 

[Proctol]

About 20% of people alive today owe it to penicillin. How effective was its predecessor sulphonamide, which had some nasty side efects?

 

[ljofa]

I think this is kind of a Alexander Graham Bell/Elisha Grey thing - my memory is a bit fuzzy but I believe that some other scientist had discovered the benefits of penicillin around the same time but Fleming had got credit for the discovery first.

If not, then the first effect would be a more serious casualty rate in WW2 followed by more deaths in Korea & Vietnam.

However, with the discovery of DNA by Crick and Watson, gene therapy might be more in vogue for various ailments and people could go tailoring their body a great deal more than they do today.

Another side effect of anti-biotics are their uses in cattle feed. They act as a mild steroids and is one of the reasons that diseases are becoming more resistant to them - farmers, in the past before it was banned in some places, would use them quite liberally to fatten up livestock. This has been one of the possibilities why OSE in sheep led to BSE in cattle which leads to CJD in humans.

 

[Admiral Matt]

I don't think anyone was actively looking for it, so delaying the discovery 10-15 years is certainly not unreasonable.