Penicillin: from discovery to product.

This document presents Sir Richard Sykess review of the 1929 paper by Alexander Fleming on the antibacterial action of cultures of penicillium. The research covered conditions for optimizing production of the new natural product penicillin named following the nomenclature applied to other natural products. Sykes cites that Flemings paper paved the way to an enormous amount of future work including an entire industry that now makes antibiotics by the ton around the globe. Furthermore the paper laid important foundations for the modern science of antibacterial chemotherapy. The last part of the paper relates to use of penicillin to make a selective medium for isolation of Bacillus influenzae becoming the forerunner of the many selective media that are now commercially available.