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50 free Penicillin trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This penicillin trivia quiz covers the drug that changed medicine. The easy questions handle the basics: who discovered it, what kind of organism it comes from, roughly when it happened, and what it is used to fight. The harder end goes into the story and the science: the September 1928 petri dish, why Fleming could not convince anyone, Cecil Paine's forgotten first cure, Howard Florey and Ernst Chain's Oxford team, the policeman Albert Alexander, the Cocoanut Grove fire, the mouldy cantaloupe that transformed production, corn steep liquor and deep-tank fermentation, why patients' urine was collected, how the beta-lactam ring wrecks a bacterial cell wall, penicillinase and MRSA, Dorothy Hodgkin's X-ray structure and John Sheehan's first synthesis. Every answer was checked against the encyclopaedia entry before publishing and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. Our medicine, medical history and vaccine quizzes are the natural next stop.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Who discovered penicillin in 1928?
Alexander Fleming
He was a Scottish physician working at St Mary's Hospital in London and found it as a crude extract of Penicillium rubens.
Q 02Penicillin was originally obtained from what kind of organism?
Moulds
Eight species of Penicillium in the section Chrysogena produce it; most clinical penicillin comes from P. chrysogenum.
Q 03Penicillins belong to which class of antibiotics, named for a ring in their structure?
Beta-lactams
The four-membered ring is essential to the drug's activity and is fused to a five-membered thiazolidine ring.
Q 04On what date did Fleming first notice a mould killing his Staphylococcus culture?
3 September 1928
He confirmed the observation on 28 September and published in 1929, coining the name to avoid saying 'mould broth filtrate'.
Q 05Fleming said he named penicillin on the same lines as which older drug, named after the foxglove?
Digitalin
The name simply says the substance came from a plant of the genus Penicillium.
Q 06What did Cecil George Paine treat in 1930 in the first successful clinical use of penicillin?
An eye infection in newborns
He treated ophthalmia neonatorum, a gonococcal infection, at the Royal Infirmary in Sheffield on 25 November 1930.
Q 07Which two scientists led the Oxford team that isolated purified penicillin in 1940?
Howard Florey and Ernst Chain
They worked at the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology; Florey was Australian and Chain a German-born refugee.
Q 08Who shared the 1945 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for penicillin?
Chain, Fleming and Florey
Norman Heatley, who devised the extraction methods, was left out.
Q 09Albert Alexander, the first patient treated with the Oxford penicillin in 1941, was what by profession?
A policeman
His severe face infection improved, but the supply of penicillin ran out and he died.
Q 10Which 1942 Boston disaster's survivors were the first burn patients treated with penicillin?
The Cocoanut Grove nightclub fire
The December 1942 fire killed hundreds; penicillin helped keep infections at bay in those who survived.
Q 11Fleming's first cure with pure penicillin, in 1942, was of Harry Lambert, who had what?
Streptococcal meningitis
Florey gave Fleming the only available sample; Lambert improved the next day and was cured within a week.
Q 12In June 1941 Florey and Heatley took their mould to which US facility to seek mass production?
The USDA's Northern Regional Research Laboratory
The Department of Agriculture facility had the fermentation equipment Britain lacked in wartime.
Q 13Anne Miller's 1942 penicillin treatment used up what share of the total supply then in existence?
Half
Q 21Why did Florey never patent penicillin?
Sir Henry Dale advised him it would be unethical
Andrew Jackson Moyer patented methods for mass production in 1945 instead.
Q 22Which country was the first to make penicillin available for civilian use after the war?
Australia
In the US it reached the general public on 15 March 1945.
Q 23Who confirmed penicillin's chemical structure by X-ray crystallography in 1945?
Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin
She won the 1964 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for this and other structure determinations; Edward Abraham had proposed the structure in 1942.
By June 1942 there was still only enough American penicillin to treat ten patients.
Q 14Where was the mould strain found in 1943 that yielded six times more penicillin than Fleming's?
On a cantaloupe in a Peoria market
It came after a worldwide search and transformed output.
Q 15What by-product of maize processing proved to be the ideal culture medium for growing penicillin mould?
Corn steep liquor
Fermentation research on it at the Peoria laboratory unlocked wartime mass production.
Q 16How many doses of penicillin had the United States produced in time for the invasion of Normandy in 1944?
2.3 million
By June 1945 output had reached more than 646 billion units a year.
Q 17Which chemical engineer developed the deep-tank fermentation plant for large-scale production?
Margaret Hutchinson Rousseau
Pfizer scientist Jasper H. Kane had suggested the deep-tank method for pharmaceutical-grade penicillin.
Q 18G. Raymond Rettew made most of the world's penicillin by 1943 by pairing a cream separator with his knowledge of what?
Mushroom spawn
During the war penicillin saved an estimated 12 to 15% of lives among Allied troops with infected wounds.
Q 19Why was urine collected from early penicillin patients?
To recover and reuse the excreted drug
About 80% of a dose leaves the body within three to four hours, and the drug was desperately scarce.
Q 20Which drug was found to slow penicillin's excretion by competing for the same kidney transporter?
Probenecid
It is still used for certain infections needing very high penicillin concentrations.
Q 24Who completed the first chemical synthesis of penicillin, at MIT in 1957?
John C. Sheehan
His route was not fit for mass production, but it opened the way to a whole family of new penicillins.
Q 25What is 6-APA, discovered at the Beecham laboratories in 1957?
The penicillin nucleus for making new penicillins
Attaching different side chains to it produced a whole range of broader and tougher penicillins.
Q 26Which two natural penicillins became the standard clinical forms in the 1940s and 1950s?
Penicillin G and penicillin V
One must be injected while the other can be swallowed.
Q 27Why can't penicillin G be taken by mouth?
It is destroyed by stomach acid
It is given by injection instead, in doses as high as 2.4 g.
Q 28Fleming's original mould mainly produced which unstable penicillin, later named after him?
F
It is unstable and produced in tiny amounts, so commercial strains were switched to make penicillin G.
Q 29Adding phenoxyacetic acid to the culture medium makes the mould produce which penicillin instead of G?
V
That is how the oral penicillin, phenoxymethylpenicillin, is manufactured.
Q 30How does penicillin kill bacteria?
It blocks the cross-linking of the cell wall so the cell bursts
By binding penicillin-binding proteins it stops peptidoglycan cross-links forming, water floods in and the cell lyses.