Penicillin

Click on this image to open a larger version. From the Royal Society archive.

The transformation of penicillin from a laboratory mould to the first life-saving antibiotic was the research initiative of Howard Florey’s team at the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology in Oxford. Their work was Nobel-prize-winning and paved the way for a new era in medicine. This chart, from Florey’s papers records the rate of division of macrophages in hen’s blood after in vitro treatment with penicillin.