Word: penicillium
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When he returned, he noticed a clear halo surrounding the yellow-green growth of a mold that had accidentally contaminated the plate. Unknown to him, a spore of a rare variant called Penicillium notatum had drifted in from a mycology lab one floor below. Luck would have it that Fleming had decided not to store his culture in a warm incubator, and that London was then hit by a cold spell, giving the mold a chance to grow. Later, as the temperature rose, the Staphylococcus bacteria grew like a lawn, covering the entire plate--except for the area surrounding...
...fact, Fleming was not even the first to describe the antibacterial properties of Penicillium. John Tyndall had done so in 1875 and, likewise, D.A. Gratia in 1925. However, unlike his predecessors, Fleming recognized the importance of his findings. He would later say, "My only merit is that I did not neglect the observation and that I pursued the subject as a bacteriologist." Although he went on to perform additional experiments, he never conducted the one that would have been key: injecting penicillin into infected mice. Fleming's initial work was reported in 1929 in the British Journal of Experimental Pathology...
...subsequent development of this or any other antibiotic, aside from happily providing other researchers with samples of his mold. It is said that he lacked both the chemical expertise to purify penicillin and the conviction that drugs could cure serious infections. However, he did safeguard his unusual strain of Penicillium notatum for posterity. The baton of antibiotic development was passed to others...
That scenario is not as farfetched as it sounds. Talk to anyone in the pharmaceutical industry, and you'll soon discover that genetics is the biggest thing to hit drug research since a penicillium mold floated into Alexander Fleming's petri dish. Sure, scientists have long known genes play a role in almost every ailment from Alzheimer's to yellow fever. But it is only in the past few years that they've learned how to use that information to identify a multitude of new targets and pathways for drug design. Let's count the ways...
Inspection reports from 1995 and 1996 obtained by TIME reveal that a wide variety of active molds, including Stachybotrys and Penicillium, continued to grow inside the building, alongside bacterial levels that were 200 times as great as OSHA's suggested "contamination threshold." Yet the '96 report, prepared by Crawford Risk Control Services for Southwest's insurance company, rated airborne spore counts inside the building as "normal" compared with those outside. Reviewing this record, Dr. David Straus of Texas Tech University's Health Sciences Center observed, "There's nothing normal about Stachybotrys. It produces a bad toxin. That...