Both patients had received injections around the clock; dire shortages of
the medicine mandated that Alexander’s urine be collected and
reprocessed. A bicycle brigade between the Radcliffe Infirmary (now the
site of the Radcliffe Humanities, a teaching space that houses faculty
offices, a library, and classrooms, located on Woodstock Road) and the
Dunn laboratory maintained the lifeline for the first recipients. Arthur
Jones was given penicillin recovered from Alexander’s urine and the
newly harvested penicillin from Heatley’s manufacturing contraptions.^12
After a month’s struggle, Albert Alexander succumbed to his ancient
enemy, but not without demonstrating a profound response to penicillin.
On the other hand, young Arthur Jones lived.
Florey and Chain rightly concluded that their little molecule might be a
stupendous breakthrough; the type of discovery that earns fame and trips
to Stockholm. But a more pressing demand was to improve upon large-
scale manufacturing. The British Commonwealth was incapable of
meeting the demand; Germany, Japan, and Italy were enemies.
Alternatively, the United States was rapidly becoming the world’s lone
superpower, even before World War II. Manufacturing giants in America
had transformed the relatively young country into a GDP colossus, and
while the United States was relatively inexperienced in chemistry and
science (compared to Germany), “the sophistication and productivity of
America’s agricultural sector was like nothing else in the world.”^13 So, in
June 1941, Florey and Heatley flew from England to Lisbon, Portugal, and
after three days’ layover, boarded a Pan American Boeing Dixie Clipper
for the transatlantic flight to LaGuardia Airport’s Marine Air Terminal,
landing on July 2.
The voyage to the United States, in retrospect, was an out-and-out
triumph. The young pharmaceutical companies in the greater New York
City area, like Pfizer, Squibb, and Merck, were eager to meet with Florey
and Heatley, having read the August 1940 publication, “Penicillin as a
Chemotherapeutic Agent,” in the Lancet. But the greatest collaborative
relationship would be with the scientists at the United States Department
of Agriculture (USDA) research labs.
The USDA labs were (and still are) tasked with improving agricultural
production while ensuring the safety and wholesomeness of crops, meat,
poultry, and eggs. The Northern Lab of the USDA is based in Peoria,
Illinois, and prior to the arrival of Florey and Heatley, had received dozens