Thread by @jasoncrawford

Was reminded recently of a crazy gap in the innovation timeline:

Alexander Fleming discovered the antibiotic properties of the Penicillium mold in 1928.

The first clinical trials of the penicillin antibiotic drug weren't until *1941*—over a decade later.

Why?

For one, there are actually many steps in between the mold and the drug. You don't just inject the mold into people or give it to them in pill form. You have to grow the mold, then extract/isolate and purify the specific antibiotic chemical it produces.

To do this was a lot of further R&D, which was not even done by Fleming, but by Howard Florey's lab at Oxford, and later with the help of the USDA Northern Regional Research Laboratory in Peoria, IL.

And it wasn't obvious to Fleming or anyone at the time that these steps would be possible: that you could create this process to manufacture a viable drug, that you could do it at scale, and that you could do it efficiently, so the drug could be produced at a reasonable price.

Further, Florey's lab was underfunded. This passage from William Rosen's book *Miracle Cure* shows how badly; Florey was scrabbling together donations of less than £1000:

This is the most astonishing part of the story to me. If you had a crystal ball in 1928 and you could peer into the future of any scientific discovery, you would have been screaming to the world, “Guys, GUYS! OVER HERE! *This* one!” [pointing furiously at Fleming/Penicillium]

But no one knew, and so Florey had to scrape together donations, and his team had to get extremely resourceful—Norman Heatley is said to have pilfered trays and dishes from the lab's kitchen to build the prototype of the machine that would distill penicillin.

This is why I say that funding models are highly important to innovation. Gotta wonder what amazing breakthrough of the next few decades is sitting in some shockingly underfunded lab today.

More on gaps in the innovation timeline on @rootsofprogress: rootsofprogress.org/when-innovatio…