Penicillin was a gift from G-d

 In a recent article in Binah magazine an attempt was made to show that the discovery of Penicillin by Alexander Fleming in 1928 was a miraculous gift from G-d. However he neglects to mention that after Fleming discovered it  became a mere medical curiosity since  Fleming was more aligned with Homeopathy than real medicine. In addition it was deemed impossible to make large and therefore useful amounts of the substance. This changed through the efforts of two individuals  ten years later, Florey and Chain, who received the Nobel prize with Fleming.  So while it was a gift from G-d the path to being a useful tool was rather convoluted rather than the smooth obvious path depicted in the article. 

Watson, Peter. The Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century (p. 368). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition. 

The age of antibiotics had taken a while to arrive. The word antibiotic itself first entered the English language at the turn of the century. Doctors were aware that bodies have their own defenses – up to a point – and since 1870 it had been known that some Penicillium molds acted against bacteria. But until the 1920s, most medical attempts to combat microbial infection had largely failed – quinine worked for malaria, and the ‘arsenicals’ worked for syphilis, but these apart, there was a general rule that ‘chemicals’ in therapy did as much damage to the patient as to the microbe. This is why the view took hold that the best way forward was some device to take advantage of the body’s own defences, the old principle of homeopathy. A leading centre of this approach was Saint Mary’s Hospital in Paddington, in London, where one of the doctors was Alexander Fleming. To begin with, Fleming worked on the Salvarsen trials in Britain (see chapter 6). However, he dropped into the lab in Paddington one day in the summer of 1928, having been away for a couple of weeks on holiday, and having left a number of cultures in the lab to grow in dishes.32 He noticed that one culture, Penicillium, appeared to have killed the bacteria in the surrounding region.33 Over the following weeks, various colleagues tried the mould on themselves – on their eye infections, for example – but Fleming failed to capitalise on this early success. Who knows what Fleming would or would not have done, but for a very different man?

The result was that penicillin became an American product (the pharmaceutical companies took Florey’s results but did their own clinical trials). For many, penicillin has always been an American invention.36 Without the help of the U.S. pharmaceutical companies, penicillin would no doubt not have had the impact it did (or have been so cheap so early), but the award of the Nobel Prize in 1945 to Fleming, Florey, and Chain showed that the intellectual achievement belonged to the British-Australians and the Russo-German Jew Chain.

comment by Rabbi Spira

שו"ת אגרות משה אורח חיים חלק ב סימן קיא

אף שצריך להאמין שהשי"ת יכול ליתן פרנסה מכל אומנות שהיא כדאר"מ שם /קידושין פ"ב/ שאין עניות מן האומנות ואין עשירות מן האומנות אלא הכל לפי זכותו, משום דאינו יודע שמא הוא אינו זוכה להרויח באומנות אחרת אלא בכזו שיותר ראויה להרוחה, אבל ידע שכל מה שירויח אחר כל הדברים והשתדלות שעושה הוא רק מהשי"ת הנותן כח לעשות חיל ותרגם אונקלוס שנותן לך עצה למקני נכסין וכן כל דבר שעושה ומרויח בזה.