Wow, spaces has changed... *pretty*  ... sorry about the title, it sounded cool!
I was actually thinking of going to sleep, but then i realised i am too hyped up (i ate like 3 tim tams before) to sleep.. so here i am.
I just watched a pretty cool documentry on SBS about the discovery and manufacture of penicillin. I think i did a spiel about it on this blog, so i am not going to do it again, but to cut a long story short, Fleming, the man we all seem to credit with making penicillin a household name is actually just the man who discovered the mould and its bacteria-eating abilities. (Which is pretty amazing in its self... but..) Fleming didnt do the hard work isolating the active ingredient from the mould (what we now call penicillan), he didnt do any of the work testing it, or figuring out a way to purify sufficient amounts of it in high concentrations, all done during WW2 where funding for a unknown scientific compound was non existant and they had to use the cambridge chemistry department as a mould factory. It took them 2 years to isolate a small amount of just pencillian.. and then the tests.. first on mice and then clinical trials, and all this was done by australian scientist Florey and his chemist, Chain and pharmist/chemist/engineer extraordinare Heartly.

Unfortunately only Fleming, Florey and Chain got the Nobel prize (although Heartly was the first person to be awarded an honoury doctorate from Cambridge university).

Now, where you ask, does fleming come into this, well he realised the potential of penicillian when the boys from cambridge began to do test trials, and he pretty much stole the publicity and drove all the credit in his directions.. when all he had done was been careless with a plate of bacteria, left them on a plate open overnight where spores of the mould dropped on them and ta-da.. not really very brilliant when it was all an accident. This was at a time where patents were considered immoral and cash sucking... if they had patented it, this problem wouldnt have arisen.
To bring things back to current events, Ian Frazer of UQ is currently having problems with his right to fame with his viral cervical cancer drug because of patent irregularities. (there are actually 2 other universities claiming to have discovered the use of virus-like particles (VLPs). [If you were wondering who the other two unis were, they are the University of Rochester and Georgetown University]. Fortunately, the drug companies who have deals with these labs, Merck and GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), have reached a side-stepped agreement so that any disputes between patents will not affect the manufacturing of the drug which will potentially save millions of women. It has already been approved in the USA by the FDA and is up for approval in Australia.

So, to wrap things up.. because the chocolate seems to be wearing off.. Fleming didnt have much to do with the actually making penicillin useful to us, he just discovered that it may be of use... and left it. The real work was done by Florey, Chain and Heartly.

The pictures attached are:
1. Pencillin mould eating a colony of bacteria (the white-blue squiggles are the bacteria, large white round thing on the bottom is the mould, you can see a clear boundry between the two where the penicillin has degraded the bacteria).
2. The chemical structure of penicillin (there isnt just one penicillin molecule, there is a whole class of them).
3. The japanese pop-band 'Penicillin'
4. Yes i realise there was no picture... the Americans apparently named a crater on the moon after Fleming, i wanted to see if i could find a picture of it, but i couldn't.