the.com/penicillium
A bread mold that learned to assassinate bacteria and accidentally rewrote human survival odds.
means A genus of common molds, recognizable by their brush-shaped spore-bearing structures, some species of which produce penicillin and others ripen cheeses.
from From Latin 'penicillus,' meaning 'little brush' or 'painter's brush' — itself a diminutive of 'penis,' which to the Romans simply meant 'tail.' Botanists peering through microscopes saw the mold's spore-bearing tips fanning out like the bristles of a tiny brush and named it accordingly. The same root gives us 'pencil,' which began life as a fine artist's brush before it ever held graphite.
- the discovery
- Fleming's messy lab killed bacteria by accident in 1928
- blue cheese
- Roquefort and brie owe their tang to it
- chemical warfare
- It evolved penicillin to murder competing microbes
- lives count
- Its antibiotics have saved an estimated 200 million people
- the spores
- Those fuzzy green-blue patches are millions of waiting colonists
penicillium notatum — the mold species fleming discovered in 1928 that led to the first antibiotic, penicillin
penicillium roqueforti — the blue-green mold used to produce roquefort cheese since medieval times in france
penicillium chrysogenum — the high-yield strain mass-produced since wwii for commercial penicillin antibiotic manufacturing