Quietly brilliant
I’m thinking about Andrew Jackson Moyer today. Who he? One of those quietly brilliant scientists – a microbiologist from Indiana who deserves to be part of the Alexander Fleming story of penicillin. Fleming famously noticed the mould in his unwashed lab dish when he got back from holiday. But it was Ernst Chain and Howard Florey who worked on producing it in bigger quantities, to save the lives of wounded soldiers returning from World War II. But even those brain boxes couldn’t make enough of it. Enter Andrew Moyer who found a way of making truly industrial amounts of penicillin by means of continuously shaking the culture of corn steep and lactose. Ok – the broth bit is a bit too sciencey for me, but the main point is…thank you Andrew Jackson Moyer! Watch Alexander Fleming’s life story here!
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