His Discoveries Were Not Taken Seriously
On February 13, 1929, Fleming made his discovery in front of the Medical Research Club. A medium for the isolation of Pfeiffer's bacillus that he discussed in his address did not get any special attention or comments. Henry Dale, the meeting's chair and then-Director of the National Institute for Medical Research, recalled decades later that he had not even noticed any particularly noteworthy aspect of Fleming's speech. In 1929, Fleming reported his discovery in the British Journal of Experimental Pathology, but the study received little attention. His issue was the challenge of isolating the primary ingredient, as well as the difficulties of making penicillin in big quantities. Chemical purification was ineffective, even with the assistance of Harold Raistrick and his group of biochemists at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Penicillin “lurched largely forgotten in the 1930s as a result” as Milton Wainwright put it.
The value of penicillin was not recognized until 1936. No one listened to Fleming when he described its medical significance at the Second International Congress of Microbiology in London. Even Fleming himself took a break from the investigation. The issue was that it was challenging to use penicillin in the human body, and the initial studies didn't produce promising outcomes. It took a long time to grow the mold that penicillin was made of. It was thought that this new material wouldn't work well for treating infections because it was difficult to isolate and produce in large quantities.
