0:00 In February 1941, a British policeman named Albert Alexander was dying.0:05 A simple scratch from a rose thorn had become a raging infection, with abscesses covering his face and body.0:14 His doctors had given up.0:16 Then they tried a new, unproven substance.0:20 And within days, he started to recover.0:23 I mean, miraculously.0:25 The fever broke, the infection receded.0:28 It was working.0:29 It was.0:30 And you know, last week we talked about the rivalry between Salk and Sabin over the polio vaccine.0:38 This story is a bit like that — a tale of obsession and credit — but it starts not with a race, but with a decade of complete and utter silence.0:50 A discovery that was made, published, and then… forgotten.0:54 The story begins, as the legend goes, by accident.0:59 It’s September 1928.1:00 A bacteriologist named Alexander Fleming returns from vacation to his lab at Saint Mary’s Hospital in London.1:09 And he finds a mess.1:11 He was notoriously untidy, which, in this case, turned out to be a good thing.1:17 On one of his petri dishes, a stray mold spore had landed and started to grow.1:24 And all around that spot of mold, the bacteria were… gone.1:29 Wiped out.1:29 Fleming realized this mold—a Penicillium mold—was producing something that killed bacteria.1:37 He called it "penicillin." He even said, "When I woke up… I certainly didn’t plan to revolutionize all medicine." But he did.1:47 Or, at least, he'd found the key.1:50 The problem was, he couldn't turn it.1:53 He couldn't isolate the active substance.1:56 He published his findings in 1929, but the scientific world sort of… shrugged.2:03 By the early thirties, the trail had gone cold.2:07 Imagine that.2:08 The cure for countless deadly infections is just a footnote in a medical journal, waiting.2:15 Until a decade later.2:17 World War Two is looming, and a team at Oxford University decides to dig up old, forgotten research that might have military use.2:27 A pathologist named Howard Florey and a biochemist, Ernst Chain, stumble upon Fleming's paper.2:35 And this is where obsession takes over.2:38 Florey and Chain weren't just curious; they were relentless.2:43 They assembled a team, including a brilliant technician named Norman Heatley who was a genius at improvisation.2:52 They needed to grow this mold in huge quantities.2:57 They used bedpans, food tins, anything they could find.3:01 The entire lab smelled like a damp cellar.3:05 And they started trying to purify this "mold juice." It was painstaking, frustrating work.3:12 But then came the moment.3:14 May 1940.3:15 They have eight mice.3:16 They infect all of them with a lethal dose of bacteria.3:21 Then they give four of them their purified penicillin.3:25 What happened next is the stuff of scientific legend.3:30 Oh, it’s incredible.3:31 The report reads like a drama.3:34 Seventeen hours later, all the untreated mice were dead.3:39 And the four mice that got penicillin?3:42 They were all perfectly fine.3:44 They had done it.3:45 They had proof.3:47 A substance that could stop a killer infection in its tracks.3:52 Which brings us back to that policeman, Albert Alexander.3:56 He was their first human test case.3:59 And it worked… until it didn't.4:02 What do you mean?4:03 They ran out of penicillin.4:06 They had so little of it, they were actually recovering it from his urine to re-inject into him.4:13 But it wasn't enough.4:15 The infection came roaring back, and he died.4:19 So they had the cure, but they couldn't make enough of it to save one single person.4:26 And all this is happening while Britain is being bombed.4:30 There was no industrial capacity to spare.4:34 Exactly.4:35 So in 1941, Florey and Heatley flew to the United States on a secret mission.4:41 They carried the living mold spores with them, just smeared into the linings of their coats.4:48 They walk into these American pharmaceutical companies—Merck, Squibb, Pfizer—and they basically say, we have something that could change the war, but we need your help to make it.5:03 And after the U.S.5:05 entered the war, the government stepped in and made penicillin production a national priority.5:12 It became this massive, coordinated industrial effort.5:17 From lab benches and bedpans to giant fermentation tanks.5:22 It was a complete transformation.5:24 And just in time.5:26 Penicillin was available for the D-Day landings.5:30 It saved thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of soldiers from dying of infected wounds.5:37 That forgotten mold from Fleming's messy lab had become a weapon of war, and a miracle of medicine.5:45 You know, in 1945, the Nobel Prize was awarded jointly to Fleming, Florey, and Chain.5:52 It’s often Fleming who gets all the credit in the popular imagination—the lone genius and his lucky accident.6:01 But that’s never the whole story, is it?6:05 Fleming saw the opportunity, but it was Florey and Chain’s team who refused to let it go.6:12 They were the ones who wrestled that discovery from a laboratory curiosity into a life-saving drug.6:20 It's a relay race, not a sprint.6:23 Fleming lit the torch, but he couldn't carry it very far.6:27 He dropped it.6:29 And for ten years, it lay there in the dark.6:32 It makes you wonder, doesn't it?6:35 How many other torches are out there, right now, just waiting for someone to come along and pick them up?
