Penicillin

Penicillin is a small, fragile molecule with an unusual architecture at its heart, and almost everything in its story - the decade it spent forgotten, the wartime crash programme, the industry that grew from it, the resistance that now threatens it - can be traced back to it. This book follows the mould from accident to mass production to the antibiotic age, and asks what happens as the bargain runs out.

80 pages · Published November 2026 · Free to read as a PDF