Multiple Choice, Multiple Answers

Read the text and answer the question by selecting all the correct responses. More than one response is correct.

From Mould to Medicine

history of medical research

The story of penicillin is often told as a lucky accident. In 1928, Alexander Fleming noticed that a mould growing on one of his culture plates had killed the bacteria around it. Yet Fleming's observation did not lead directly to a medicine. He found the active substance difficult to extract, it seemed to break down quickly, and after publishing his results he moved on to other work. More than a decade passed before a team at Oxford, led by Howard Florey and Ernst Chain, returned to the problem. Their contribution was less a single insight than years of patient laboratory work. They developed methods to purify penicillin, showed in 1940 that it protected infected mice, and then treated the first human patients. Supplies were so scarce at first that penicillin was recovered from patients' urine and reused. Turning a laboratory success into a widely available drug required yet another set of skills. During the Second World War, government agencies and drug companies in the United States worked together on large-scale fermentation, and researchers found a strain of mould, growing on a melon, that produced far more penicillin than Fleming's. By 1944, production was large enough to treat many wounded soldiers. Historians now use the case to show that a discovery and a usable treatment are different achievements, each depending on different people and resources.

According to the passage, which of the following statements are true?

• A. Fleming gave up on penicillin because his own tests showed it was harmful to infected mice.
• B. Fleming's discovery did not become a treatment at once, partly because the substance was hard to extract.
• C. The Oxford team's main achievement was a sudden insight that Fleming himself had failed to notice.
• D. Early supplies were limited because drug companies refused to invest until the war had ended.
• E. A more productive strain of mould helped to make large-scale manufacture of penicillin possible.
• F. Penicillin recovered from patients' urine was the main source of the drug given to wounded soldiers.