Penicillin (Alexander Fleming in 1928)

- Penicillin is given to patients with an infection caused by bacteria. Some types of

bacterial infections that may be treated with penicillin include pneumonia, strep throat,
meningitis, syphilis, and gonorrhea. It may also be used to prevent dental infections. As an
antibiotic, penicillin kills bacteria or prevents them from growing and multiplying.
1928

 Alexander Fleming, a Scottish researcher, is credited with the discovery of

penicillin in 1928. At the time, Fleming was experimenting with the influenza virus
in the Laboratory of the Inoculation Department at St. Mary’s Hospital in London.
 Returning from vacation, he started cleaning up his messy lab and noticed that
some petri dishes containing Staphylococcus bacteria had been contaminated
with a mold, which was preventing the normal growth of the bacteria. He
obtained an extract from the mold and named its active agent ‘penicillin’.
 Fleming's lab didn't have the resources to fully develop his discovery into a
usable drug. For more than a decade, other scientists tried to purify penicillin but
were unsuccessful.
1939

 Howard Florey, a pathology professor at Oxford University, read Fleming's paper

in the British Journal of Experimental Pathology. Florey and his colleagues were
able to purify penicillin and test its effectiveness on animals before the first trial
with a human. On Feb. 12, 1941, Albert Alexander received the first dose of
penicillin. In just a few days, the treatment began healing Alexander of a life-
threatening infection. Unfortunately, Florey's team ran out of the drug before
Alexander was completely healed, and he died.
1940

 Enough penicillin was produced to successfully treat the next patient. Anne
Miller, a patient at New Haven Hospital in Connecticut, had a miscarriage and
developed an infection that led to blood poisoning. Penicillin administration
cleared Miller's infection.
 During World War II, penicillin was mass-produced and used to treat infections in
wounded and ill soldiers. Historically, infections had killed more soldiers at war
than battle injuries, Markel wrote. The discovery of penicillin decreased the death
rate from bacterial pneumonia in soldiers from 18% to 1%.
1945

 In 1945, Fleming, Florey and Florey's colleague, Ernst Chain, received the Nobel
Prize in physiology or medicine for their discovery of penicillin.
The discovery of penicillin has more significant to the field of science. The discovery of
penicillin changed the course of modern medicine significantly, due to penicillin infections that
were previously untreatable and life threatening were now easily treated. These diseases
include tonsillitis, bronchitis, and pneumonia, which are all life threatening if left untreated, but
with the help of penicillin the chances of survival increased significantly. Even dating back to
World War Two, penicillin was crucial to saving millions of lives, with it decreasing the death rate
from bacterial pneumonia in soldiers from 18% to 1%. Also, not only has penicillin directly
change the world of medicine, by treating some bacterial infections, it also led to the creation of
over a hundred other antibiotics, which all help improve the quality of life of people who without
the antibiotics would be suffering from life-threatening diseases.

World Wide Web (WWW) (Tim Berners-Lee, 1989)

- The world wide web (‘www’ or ‘web’ for short) is a collection of webpages found on this
network of computers. The Web gives users access to a vast array of documents that are
connected to each other by means of hypertext or hypermedia links—i.e., hyperlinks, electronic
connections that link related pieces of information to allow a user easy access to them.
1989

 Tim Berners-Lee, a British scientist, invented the World Wide Web (WWW) in
1989, while working at CERN.
 Tim Berners-Lee wrote the first proposal for the World Wide Web in March 1989.
1990

 Tim wrote his second proposal in May.

 By October of 1990, Tim had written the three fundamental technologies that
remain the foundation of today’s web (and which you may have seen appear on
parts of your web browser):
o HTML: HyperText Markup Language. The markup (formatting) language
for the web.
o URI: Uniform Resource Identifier. A kind of “address” that is unique and
used to identify to each resource on the web. It is also commonly called a
URL (Uniform Resource Locator).
o HTTP: Hypertext Transfer Protocol. Allows for the retrieval of linked
resources from across the web.
 Together with Belgian systems engineer Robert Cailliau, this was formalised as a
management proposal in November.
 Tim also wrote the first web page editor/browser (“WorldWideWeb.app”) and the
first web server (“httpd“). By the end of 1990, the first web page was served on
the open internet.
1991

 People outside of CERN were invited to join this new web community.
 Berners-Lee released his WWW software. It included the ‘line-mode’ browser,
Web server software and a library for developers.
 In March 1991, the software became available to colleagues using CERN
computers. A few months later, in August 1991, he announced the WWW
software on Internet newsgroups and interest in the project spread around the
world.
 This discovery was developed to meet the demand for automated information-sharing
between scientists in universities and institutes around the world, but it didn’t just stop there. It
didn’t just contribute to the field of science; it also had a great contribute to the development of
the technology. The world wide web opened the internet to everyone, not just scientists. To
merge the evolving technologies of computers, data networks and hypertext into a powerful and
easy to use global information system, it connected the world in a way that was not possible
before and made it much easier for people to get information, share and communicate. It
allowed people to share their work and thoughts through social networking sites, blogs, and
video sharing. Thus, the web is still changing today. Search engines have become better at
reading, understanding, and processing information. They have found clever ways to find the
content we want and can even show us other things that might interest us.

References
Bitesize Editor. (2020). What is the World Wide Web. Retrieved from Bitesize:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/topics/zkcqn39/articles/z2nbgk7

Bradford, A. (2019, May 31). Penicillin: Discovery, Benefits, and Resistance. Retrieved from Livescience:
https://www.livescience.com/65598-penicillin.html

CERN . (2021). Where the Web was born. Retrieved from CERN:
https://home.cern/science/computing/birth-web/short-history-web

Editor. (2020). How the discovery of penicillin has influenced modern medicine. Retrieved from The
Oxford Scientist: https://oxsci.org/how-the-discovery-of-penicillin-has-influenced-modern-
medicine/

Web Foundation. (2012). History of the Web. Retrieved from World Wide Web Foundation:
https://webfoundation.org/about/vision/history-of-the-web/