The first of five clues. Each one below gives a little more away.
I was found because somebody did not tidy up before going on holiday.
For twelve years after I was noticed, almost nobody could make enough of me to matter.
The strain that finally worked was scraped off a rotting melon in an Illinois market.
I ended the age in which a scratch could kill you.
The first antibiotic, grown from a mould.
Penicillin
Fleming saw it in 1928 and could not purify it. It took Florey, Chain and a mouldy cantaloupe from a Peoria fruit stall to turn an observation into medicine — just in time for the war.
Fleming's mould, in 1928, killed bacteria in a dish and then defeated him: he could not extract enough to treat anyone, and largely moved on. The work that mattered happened in Oxford a decade later, where Howard Florey and Ernst Chain purified enough to test on mice, then on one policeman who improved dramatically and died anyway when the supply ran out. Scale came from American fermentation plants and, famously, a mouldy cantaloupe from a market in Peoria whose strain yielded far more than anything in the laboratory. By D-Day there was enough for the wounded.
Reading five clues at once is not the game. In the real thing they arrive one at a time and every wrong guess costs an hour. Play mystery #33 · today's mystery · the vault
Previous: mystery #32. Next: mystery #34. Or try #16, #17, #18, #19, #20, #21.