一战战死的一千万士兵中，差不多一半死于本来只是轻伤的伤口感染。在抗生素发现之前，水泡引起的细菌感染就可以要一个人的命。这就是为什么当时工业国家的人均寿命也只有47岁。
二战中，美国军方仅次于原子弹的耗资第二大的研发项目是盘尼西林。他们勉强在诺曼底登陆之前批量生产出来了。而在中国战区，大部分伤员只能用酒精和红药水，就连磺胺药都稀缺，更不用说盘尼西林了。盘尼西林在香港黑市的价格，大约是一条“小黄鱼”金条一盒。
1928年苏格兰科学家 Alexander Fleming发现了盘尼西林的杀菌作用，但无法提取其有效成分，后来放弃了。1939年二战在欧洲爆发，澳大利亚医生Howard Florey得到了funding from the Rockefeller Foundation in New York to study Fleming’s discovery further at the University of Oxford.
原谅我，为了省时间就不翻译了，直接摘录英文吧：
Through trial and error, the team had discovered that penicillin was much more effective and safer in fighting bacteria in animals than sulfa drugs, which were the treatment for infections at the time. Discovered by German scientists in the 1930s, sulfa drugs had severe side effects, and researchers were motivated to find an alternative.
As they tried to cultivate penicillin, they began a few human tests. In summer 1940, Albert Alexander, a police officer, scratched his face. The scratch became infected by streptococci and staphylococci and spread to his eyes and scalp. A few weeks later, he was admitted to an Oxford University hospital and given doses of a sulfa drug for a week. Not only did the drug not cure him but it gave him a terrible rash.
Alexander was in great pain for months as he lay in the hospital with no cure available. His face and arms were oozing pus everywhere, and his left eye became so infected that it had to be removed. The bacteria soon spread to his lungs and shoulders. Desperate, doctors gave him 200 milligrams of penicillin, the largest individual dose ever given at the time, and then three doses of 100 mg every three hours. Within 24 hours, Alexander’s fever went back to normal and his appetite returned. But his treatment had used up the nation’s entire supply of penicillin. After 10 days of stability, his condition deteriorated without any more of the drug. A second course would have helped him to fully heal, but no more to give him. On March 15, he died,
The Oxford team continued to hunt for methods to produce more penicillin, knowing penicillin’s urgent value in treating wounded soldiers and civilians。
As Europe sank deeper into war, labs around the world got word of the Oxford lab’s penicillin research and began requesting samples. Florey and his team were careful not to send any to German scientists, who could have easily developed them to support the Nazi war effort.
British pharmaceutical companies were interested in mass-producing penicillin, but they were overburdened by wartime demand for other drugs. Florey and Heatley began looking overseas for help, turning once again to the Rockefeller Foundation in New York. Florey realized that the United States, which had not entered the war yet, had many more pharmaceutical firms than Britain with much more capacity to produce penicillin on a large scale.
Florey visited U.S. drug companies in the hope of persuading one or more of them to brew the culture fluid and extract the mold to yield enough for his experiments. Then war struck the United States: The Japanese attacked U.S. Navy ships anchored in Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941. The declaration of war on the United States by Germany and Italy changed not only the course of the war but also the course of the development of penicillin. With millions of American lives now at stake, penicillin was no longer just a scientific fascination — it was a medical necessity.
Ten days after the Pearl Harbor attack, pharmaceutical companies began escalating penicillin production for the war effort, some experimenting with a process called deep-tank fermentation to extract the drug from the mold.
As war escalated throughout 1942, researcher Andrew Moyer led the USDA Peoria lab in finding the most potent penicillin mold that would hold up during fermentation extraction. Each day, he sent assistant Mary Hunt to local markets for decaying fruit or anything with fungal growth to find more-productive strains of the penicillin mold. Earning the nickname “Moldy Mary,” she once found a cantaloupe “with a mold so powerful that in time it became the ancestor of most of the penicillin produced in the world.”
Throughout 1943, penicillin production became the War Department’s No. 2 priority after the Manhattan Project’s drive to build a nuclear bomb.
In July 1943, the War Production Board made plans for widespread distribution of penicillin stocks to Allied troops fighting in Europe. Then scientists worked round-the-clock to prepare for an ultimate goal: having enough to support the D-Day invasion.
On June 6, 1944, 73,000 U.S. troops landed on the beaches of Normandy, boosted by millions of doses of the miracle drug. Almost three years to the day that Florey arrived in New York, American production of penicillin had risen from 0 to 100 billion units per month using deep-tank fermentation — enough to treat every Allied casualty.