It has become almost traditional for historians of geology to claim that Roderick Murchison (1792–1871) ‘opened to view for the first time’ the fossiliferous rocks below the Old Red Sandstone which Murchison described in his monumental work The Silurian System published in 1839. Murchison himself claimed in the introduction to this work ‘no-one was previously aware of the existence below the Old Red Sandstone of a regular series of deposits, containing peculiar organic remains’. Professor John Phillips expressed the traditional view well when he wrote of the larger area of which Shropshire forms a part: ‘practically before the Summer of 1831 the whole field of the ancient rocks and fossils… was unexplored but then arose two men… Adam Sedgwick and Roderick Murchison and simultaneously set to work to cultivate what had been left a desert’. Against this we must set the statement of George B. Greenough (1778–1855), first president of the Geological Society of London, as reported in 1841. He had ‘frequently expressed a conviction, as a result of his own observations…, that adequate enquiry alone was wanting to prove the existence of a succession of strata in the west of England, and in Wales—not less regular than that which had been demonstrated in the centre and east of the Island.’

In the past thirty or forty years scientists, historians, and others have written many histories of the wonder drug, penicillin. However, almost all of these works fail to develop an important part of the history of penicillin: the attempt to synthesize the drug during the Second World War. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to explore this largely unexamined episode in the history of science, and to answer some relevant questions. For example, why was there a need for synthetic penicillin? What organizational plans had to be made in order to accommodate this massive endeavor? What was the effect of the search for a synthesis on the natural production of this drug? And finally, did chemists ever devise a successful synthesis? Before attempting to answer these and other questions, a brief introduction to 1) the discovery and development of penicillin as a therapeutic agent, and 2) the general organization of wartime medical research in the United States and Great Britain, is necessary.