Word: notatum
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...extracted from body fluids. But when he looked at the dishes, Fleming noticed that the bacterial cultures within were dying off. The killer: "mold juice," as he called it, the product of spores that had probably wafted in from a lab downstairs. Fleming determined that the spores were Penicillium notatum and renamed the juice penicillin. However, it was a decade before other scientists took notice of Fleming's work, purified penicillin and turned it into a miracle drug. --By Michael Lemonick
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...
...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...
...earlier work of Gerhard Domagk, who in 1935 showed that the injection of a simple compound, Prontosil, cured systemic streptococcal infections. This breakthrough demonstrated that invading bacteria could be killed with a drug and led to a fevered search in the late 1930s for similar compounds. Fleming's Penicillium notatum became the convenient starting point for Florey's team at Oxford...
...watching the swing of a lamp in the Cathedral of Pisa and deducing from it the law of the pendulum, and Isaac Newton watching the fall of an apple and deducing from it the law of gravity. For thousands of years men looked at the cryptogamic mold called Penicillium notatum, but Dr. Fleming was the first to see its meaning. His discernment, restoring to science the creative vision which it has sometimes been held to lack, restored health to millions of men living and unborn...