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70 free Antibiotics trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Antibiotics trivia goes well beyond the mouldy petri dish. Before penicillin there was Paul Ehrlich's arsenic 'magic bullet' for syphilis and Bayer's red dye Prontosil; after Fleming there was a team in Oxford growing mould in bedpans, a cantaloupe from a market in Peoria, corn steep liquor, and 2.3 million doses ready for D-Day. And before all of that, apparently, there were Nubians drinking tetracycline in their beer. This quiz covers the whole arc: the ancient hints, Ehrlich and Hata's compound 606, Domagk's Nobel, Fleming's plate at St Mary's, Florey, Chain, Heatley and Hodgkin, the policeman who died when the drug ran out, urine recycling, probenecid, how the β-lactam ring breaks the bacterial cell wall, β-lactamases and clavulanic acid, ampicillin and methicillin, MRSA, colistin-resistant E. coli, WHO consumption tables, the EU's ban on growth promoters, and the phage, antisense and CRISPR ideas queued up to replace what we are losing. Easy questions suit anyone who has finished a course; expert ones assume you know who first synthesised penicillin in a flask. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on antibiotics and penicillin, and the supporting sentence is attached to each question.
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Q 01Antibiotics work against bacteria but are useless against which of these?
Viruses
Prescribing them for colds and other viral infections is one of the commonest forms of misuse.
Q 02What does the word 'antibiotic' literally mean, from its Greek roots?
'Opposing life'
In strict usage the term covers substances one microbe makes to fight another; fully synthetic drugs like sulfonamides are technically 'antibacterials'.
Q 03Who discovered penicillin after noticing mould on a culture plate at a London hospital?
Alexander Fleming
He could not persuade anyone it mattered, largely because the substance was so hard to isolate.
Q 04At which London hospital was penicillin discovered?
St Mary's, Paddington
The laboratory is now a museum, and an International Historic Chemical Landmark plaque was placed there in 1999.
Q 05Which bacterium was growing on the famous contaminated culture plate that led to penicillin?
Staphylococcus aureus
The chance observation was made on 3 September and confirmed with a new experiment on 28 September.
Q 06Penicillin is produced by moulds of which genus?
Penicillium
The species on the original plate was eventually identified as P. rubens; most commercial penicillin comes from P. chrysogenum.
Q 07In which year was penicillin discovered?
1928
The discoverer published his experiment the following year and named the substance penicillin.
Q 08Ehrlich and Hata's 1910 syphilis drug Salvarsan was known by what number in their series of experiments?
606
It was the first synthetic antibacterial and was marketed by Hoechst from late 1910.
Q 09Salvarsan, the first synthetic antibacterial drug, was a compound of which element?
Arsenic
Ehrlich had started from dyes, noticing that some stained bacterial cells but not human ones.
Q 10Gerhard Domagk developed Prontosil, the first sulfonamide, at the laboratories of which German company?
Bayer
It worked against Gram-positive cocci but not enterobacteria, and won him a Nobel Prize.
Q 11Why could sulfanilamide, the active ingredient of Prontosil, not be patented?
It had long been used in the dye industry
That helped the sulfa drugs spread fast and opened the era of antibacterials.
Q 12Which American microbiologist first used the term 'antibiotic' in journal articles in 1942?
Selman Waksman
His definition covered substances made by one microbe that stop others growing, which excluded synthetic sulfonamides.
Q 13The 1945 Nobel Prize for penicillin was shared by its discoverer and which two Oxford scientists?
Howard Florey and Ernst Chain
Q 21Because early penicillin was so scarce, doctors routinely recovered and reused it from what?
Patients' urine
About 80 percent of a dose is cleared from the body within three to four hours.
Q 22Which gout drug was given with penicillin to slow its excretion and prolong its effect?
Probenecid
It competes for the same transporter in the kidney, and is still used when very high penicillin levels are needed.
Q 23Penicillin kills bacteria by blocking the final step in building which structure?
The cell wall
With fewer cross-links in its peptidoglycan, the cell cannot hold its osmotic gradient, water floods in and it bursts.
Their team purified penicillin G in 1942, though it stayed scarce outside the Allied military until 1945.
Q 14Which Oxford crystallographer confirmed the structure of penicillin by X-ray in 1945?
Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin
She won the 1964 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for this and other structure determinations.
Q 15Albert Alexander, first patient of Oxford's penicillin in 1941, improved and then died. Why?
The drug ran out
The Oxford team simply could not make enough; several later patients were treated successfully.
Q 16The high-yield wartime penicillin mould was found on a mouldy what in a Peoria market?
Cantaloupe
It produced six times as much penicillin as the original London mould.
Q 17Which by-product did the Peoria laboratory use as a fermentation medium to boost penicillin yields?
Corn steep liquor
The lab was a federal one and already had large fermentation facilities.
Q 18How many doses of penicillin had the United States produced in time for the Normandy invasion in 1944?
2.3 million
By June 1945 production had reached over 646 billion units a year.
Q 19Which country was the first to make penicillin available for civilian use after the Second World War?
Australia
The US public got access on 15 March 1945.
Q 20Why did Howard Florey never patent penicillin?
He was advised it would be unethical
Sir Henry Dale gave the advice; the American Andrew Jackson Moyer patented the mass-production methods in 1945 instead.
Q 24Which structural feature of penicillin binds to bacterial enzymes and gives its drug family its name?
The β-lactam ring
Cephalosporins and carbapenems keep the same ring at the centre of their structures.
Q 25Bacteria resist penicillin by producing which enzymes that break open its ring?
β-lactamases
Drugs like clavulanic acid bind these enzymes irreversibly so the antibiotic can work.
Q 26Why is clavulanic acid added to some penicillin-type antibiotics?
It disables the bacteria's defensive enzyme
The combination is among the most consumed antibiotics in the world.
Q 27Which broad-spectrum semisynthetic penicillin of 1961 was the first major development from its nucleus?
Ampicillin
It became possible once 6-APA, the core of the penicillin molecule, could be isolated.
Q 28The 'M' in the superbug MRSA stands for resistance to which antibiotic?
Methicillin
That drug was designed to beat β-lactamase-producing bacteria, and then the resistant staph strains emerged anyway.
Q 29The penicillin 'nucleus' 6-APA was discovered in 1957 at which company's laboratories?
Beecham
Attaching different side groups to it produced penicillins with better spectrum, stability and oral absorption.
Q 30Which MIT chemist completed the first chemical synthesis of penicillin in 1957?
John C. Sheehan
His route was no good for mass production but yielded new peptide-synthesis methods and protecting groups.