Howard Florey saw potential enemies everywhere, but with "friends" like A N Richards and Robert Coghill, he hardly need bother looking any further

Howard Florey's correspondence twice notes that he has just received a higher yielding strain of penicillium from America.

Spores and Wartime Secrecy : can they actually co-exist ?

You might think I am going to talk about Anthrax spores and asymmetrical terrorist germ warfare.

But you are wrong, wrong, wrong.

I want to talk instead about wartime penicillin, and a part of it that is never ever discussed.

Its inherently asymmetrical medical nature.

Which appropriately enough, then  "drifts over" into its inherently asymmetrical military potential.

A full two years after Florey arrives at Peoria, the NRRL starts looking for new sources of penicillin strains..."Soon" ?

Penicillin: II. Natural Variation

and Penicillin Production in

Penicillium notatum and

Allied Species

If pollyanna historians says two years - in the middle of a war - is "soon" , then I guess it must be so.

Florey quickly flees the biology of NRRL Peoria for the chemical comforts of Merck

Howard Florey probably spent no more than a few hours of his whole life in the labs of the NRRL at Peoria, Illinois where most of the fruitful work that gave us the antibiotics revolution was actually done.