overed, increasing efficiency of production. By the time the war ended, scientists had gone from having to recycle patient’s urine in order to conserve penicillin to producing enough to treat seven million patients per year. In 1945, Fleming, Florey, and Chain were all awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine, so the discovery of penicillin was quite a drawn-out process when taken into consideration the amount of time it took to produce a practical form of the drug. This set off a search in medicine for more antibiotics, however, scientists would have to look away from the natural world this time.Although selective breeding and radiation therapy already give penicillin a storied history in biotechnology, the advent of new genetic engineering techniques that allow for designer drugs to be produced have kept penicillin on the forefront of antibiotic treatment. Often, The mechanism of action is still the same as far as the chemical structure is concerned. However, the means of production are much more efficient in terms of cost and evaluating new strains of bacteria. These two qualities are highly desirable in the field since bacteria have the ability to quickly mutate and render standard antibiotics ineffective....
