Hannah Thomasy in The Scientist:
Tucked away in a dusty corner of St. Mary’s Hospital in London lies a tiny, one-room museum dedicated to one of the most important discoveries in the history of medicine: a mold that changed the world. Curators have recreated Alexander Fleming’s laboratory as it would have looked on the day of his discovery, from the cigarettes that he smoked incessantly while working in the lab to a replica of the famous Petri dish of Penicillium.
While samples of the original isolate, known as Penicillium rubens IMI 15378, are cryopreserved in collections around the world, this strain is curiously absent from modern-day commercial penicillin production. The isolate used in mass production today didn’t originate in Fleming’s laboratory at all; instead, the multi-billion dollar industry uses a microbe derived from a moldy cantaloupe found at a fruit market in Peoria, Illinois in the early 1940s.1
More here.
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