Given our pressing need for new antibiotics, or a whole new class of antibiotic-like drugs, perhaps we ought to try learning lessons from the history of penicillin (it might even help someone win the new Longitude Prize!) Can history teach us how to make new discoveries?. Photograph: Radu Razvan /Alamy Historians of science and medicine are often terrible killjoys when it comes to great stories about discovery and genius. We've been quick to point out that the apocryphal story of Fleming discovering penicillin mould 'by accident' when it blew in through a window and landed on a discarded petri dish is, well, apocryphal. We're less unanimous about the way penicillin became a drug. Although...
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