(Fleming never did see penicillin as an antibiotic. A decade later Howard Florey and Ernst Chain, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, did, and they developed Fleming’s observation into the first wonder drug. It was so scarce and so powerful that in World War II, U.S. Army teams recovered it from the urine of men who had been treated with it, so it could be reused. In 1945, Florey, Chain, and Fleming shared the Nobel Prize.)
