Mobilizing for War

After the war, when the British pharmaceutical industry had built up its research capabilities and taken over the collaboration with scientists, it nevertheless continued to receive criticism for lagging behind and having failed to meet the challenge of penicillin. ¹ However, industry was not the only scapegoat. British scientific élites were also blamed for the loss of this miraculous discovery. Howard Florey was accused of having handed penicillin to the Americans ‘on a platter’, ² and Edward Mellanby, then Secretary of the MRC, was criticized for his old-fashioned attitude to patenting. ³ Thus, penicillin became at once an ‘icon’ of success and of failure: success at discovering, failure at developing. ⁴ Robert Bud has shown that one of the most enduring myths surrounding penicillin was that of its ‘theft’ by the Americans, and that this myth reveals the ambiguous feelings of the British nation towards its changing status in the post-war world. ⁵