2.3 million doses of penicillin were manufactured in preparation for the D-Day landing.
Desperately ill, Albert Alexander, a middle-aged police officer, lay in an Oxford, England, infirmary. It had started with a thorn scratch on his face as he tended his rose garden, according to a common account—or, as other evidence suggests, from a minor injury suffered in a German bombing raid. Now, though, he had lost an eye and was oozing pus all over from sepsis, an extreme and potentially lethal reaction to infection. He had at least come to the right place.
Researchers at Oxford University, led by Howard Florey, an Australian pathologist, and Ernst Chain, a biochemist who had fled Nazi Germany, were developing a promising new drug. On February 12, 1941, Alexander became the first patient…
