On March 11, 1942, a 33-year-old woman named Anne Miller lay dying in a New Haven, Connecticut hospital. A blood infection had pushed her temperature to 107 degrees, and nothing the doctors tried was working. Her family was being told to prepare for the worst. Then her doctor remembered hearing about a new experimental medicine made from mold, and managed to get hold of a tiny sample - about half of all the penicillin existing in the entire United States at the time. They gave her a shot at 3:30 in the afternoon. By the next morning, her fever had broken.
The medicine traced back to 1928, when a Scottish scientist named Alexander Fleming returned from vacation to find that mold had drifted into one of his petri dishes and killed the bacteria around it. He named the mystery mold-juice penicillin but couldn't figure out how to mass-produce it. Over a decade later, scientists at Oxford finally cracked the puzzle, and American factories started growing penicillin in giant vats - using a moldy cantaloupe from an Illinois market as the secret super-strain.
Anne Miller lived another 57 years and died in 1999 at age 90. By then, penicillin and the antibiotics that followed had saved an estimated 200 million lives, turning infections that once killed kings and queens into something a quick visit to the doctor can usually fix. The whole revolution in medicine started with a forgetful scientist, a contaminated dish, a moldy melon, and one very sick patient in Connecticut who became the first person ever pulled back from the edge by the world's first true wonder drug.
