Why did Alexander Fleming call the first anitibiotic penicillin?

Answer 1

Fleming stumbled across the Penicillium bacterium by accident; he didn't mean to create the drug. When he discovered that the mold could kill other bacteria in a Petri dish, he wondered if the same could happen inside the human body, and started experimenting until he came up with penicillin. Now, penicillin is one of the most widely-used antibiotics.

The drug was named after the mold it comes from, Penicillium. The mold looks like a brush under the microscope, and "penicillus" means "small brush" in Latin.

Answer 2

Penicillin was named so, after the fungus that it was extracted from in 1928 "Penicillium notatum", for which Sir Alexander Fleming shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1945 with Florey and Chain. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Answer 3

the name penicillin was given because the production of this antibiotic came from bacteria penicillin

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Must disagree with above answer. Penicillin was derived from a mold, not a bacteria, called Penicillium. Penicillin can be isolated from Penicillium notatum (green mold) and Penicillium nigricans (black mold). It extremely common, grows everywhere, and is basically a nuisance organism that spoils food. The wild strains that turn your bread and Oranges moldy contain very little penicillin, however. The strains used commercially have been cross bred over time to make hundreds of times more antibiotic than the naturally occurring ones.

--vsk, pharmacist.

Answer 4

He didn't. However, Alexander Fleming IS the person credited with discovering penicillin.

We all remember the tale of Fleming coming back one-day finding sort of mess in his lab. He found a mold growing on his plate he had streaked with staphylococcus. He also noticed a clear space around the mold. He was not the first to notice that bacteria and molds didn't get along. He said that the mold had produced an antibiotic.

He didn't go any further than that since others have reported the same thing. The idea though was picked up by another scientist who tried to make enough of the antibiotic to be useful. Sometime later enough was produced using a different mold. He knew so little about the mold that caused the ring with an antibiotic in it that he called it Penicillium notatum but it was really Penicillium ribium.

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Penicillin is referred to as the first antibiotic substance. It was created to fight bacterial infections, by introducing a substance that inhibited bacterial growth, or killed the bacteria outright.

Answer 5

Fleming stumbled across the penicillium bacterium by accident, he didn't mean to create it. When he discovered that it could kill other bacteria in a Petri dish, he wondered if the same could happen inside the human body, and started experimenting until he came up with penicillin. Now, penicillin is one of the most effective antibiotics in use.

Answer 6

Alexander Fleming named Penicillin from the fungus, Penicillium notatum.

Answer 7

The day he discovered he had no idea that it would happen. it was an accidental discovery.

Answer 8

He didn't. He "discovered" it by accident. I say that in quotes because the ancient Egyptians had recognized that some molds carried anti-bacterial properties.

Answer 9

To protect people from dying