One in a Melon

Fact # 4060|International Week of Science

Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin in 1928, but his mould produced so little that early trials recycled the drug from patients’ urine. The breakthrough came in 1943 from a mouldy cantaloupe found at a market in Illinois, whose strain produced far more and is still the basis of the industry today. Penicillin has since saved over 80 million lives, and Illinois has made the mould its state microbe. Nobody is sure who found the melon: perhaps lab technician “Moldy Mary” Hunt, or an anonymous woman who handed it to a lab guard and left.

Sources: one, two