Penicillin - Activity 5
The Ultimate Penicillin Prize
The discovery and development of penicillin to the stage where it became
a widely-used drug was the work of many different men and women working
in hospitals, science labs and industrial sites. However, when the Nobel
prize for |medicine was awarded in 1945 just three of the people involved
were singled out for the prize - Alexander Fleming, Howard Florey and
Ernst Chain.
Use this site to find out about as many of the people involved in the
penicillin story as possible - and choose one of them for the Ultimate
Penicillin Prize! The instructions for doing this are given below.
- Once you have decided who you are going to chose, you must write
down a brief 'citation' - in other words, a description of why you
think this person deserves the Ultimate Penicillin Prize.
- Record the choices of everyone in your science class and produce
a bar chart to display the results.
- Get together with everyone else who chose the same person as you
and spend a few minutes producing the 'Ultimate citation' - try to
write down all the points that everyone has thought of. Chose a representative
to read your citation out to the class.
- Hear the citations for all the people chosen - and then take a vote
for the winner of the Ultimate Penicillin Prize.
- Collect the results, draw a chart or graph to show them clearly,
and compare it with your initial results.
- Who wins the Ultimate Penicillin Prize?
- Do you agree with the choice?
- Did listening to the citations change many minds or were the 'before'
and 'after' results very similar?
- What are the main difficulties with the awarding of any prize like
this, fictional or real?
The germ theory of disease
Finding out about Fleming
Florey, Chain and large-scale production
Accident or design?
The unsung heroes
Penicillin - the true story?
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