Could You Make Penicillin in the Amazon Rainforest?

Added: 2026-06-08

[00:00:00]Your name is Julianne. You're flying home from the beaches of Rio when your plane is hit by lightning and shatters into pieces around you. You fall two miles straight down into the jungle, still strapped to your seat, and land in a tree. But thanks to the updraft in the storm that made you crash in the first place, the air slows you down just enough to where you practically walk away with just a broken collarbone, concussion, torn knee ligament, and deep gash on your arm where fly larva settle in uninvited. You were the only survivor from the crash.

[00:00:30]Does that make me lucky? And getting lost here sucks cuz the Amazon is Australia's equally deadly cousin.

[00:00:36]That's not a knife. That's a knife. The Amazon is huge, hot, and the entirety of nature will strive to make your painful life as short as possible. So far, this tale has been a true story. 17-year-old Julianne Cop fell out of a busted plane over the Amazon in 1971. But we're going to make things a little worse for Julianne. As terrible as it sounds, fly larvae are not the worst thing to be growing in your wounds. Let's say instead of fly larvae, it became infected with a little pinch of leptosperosis, which can be deadly unless treated with penicellin as quickly as possible. And we'll say she was traveling in July, which in the southern hemisphere is wintertime. So, she's going to need antibiotics and fire. As you may know, penicellin was discovered accidentally in a lab by Alexander Fleming in 1928.

[00:01:24]It literally floated in through the window and started randomly growing in a petri dish, killing the surrounding bacteria. This is one of those rare accidents that ends up changing humanity forever, like X-rays, pacemakers, or that delicious diabetes laden slurpee.

[00:01:38]Julianne is in one of the most biologically diverse places on the planet. 10% of all known species on Earth live in the Amazon rainforest.

[00:01:46]That's 50,000 plant species, 2 and a half million different types of insects, and over 4,300 animal species. That means a lot of stuff can kill you. But if you're a glass half full kind of dying girl on the other side of that coin, if you need to make something, you have more ingredients here than almost anywhere else. So surely she can find what she needs to make herself some medicine to stop the infection, plus some fire for warmth, right? Let's dive in. Julianne has no idea where she is or when, if ever, she'll be rescued. So matters are put into her own hands whether she likes it or not. Go get him, Tiger.

[00:02:22]Leptosperosis takes days to weeks to kill you. So, warmth is her first priority since the temperature gets down to 45° Fahrenheit or 7 Celsius at night, which isn't super cold, but enough to be dangerous when you're a skinny dying girl and the closest parkers are 1,000 mi away. Penicellin is also like a delicate baby that needs to stay warm to grow. So, making fire will kill two birds with one stone. Twisting a stick real fast is not as easy as the cartoons make it look. This nonsense here is all but impossible. She has no flint and steel. What if she tries to make matches? Perhaps, just maybe, that's easier. No animals just poop out potassium chlorate for her to make a regular matchick. But conceivably, she could round up a different ignitable material. If she can obtain a dry, dense hardwood twig, preferably from a Brazil nut or joba tree, plus some brew tree resin and some cottonlike kapoke fiber, she just got to dip the twig in resin.

[00:03:18]Dip that in the cotton fluff. Let the resin harden into a solid flammable binder. Then strike it hard and fast against a rock and she got heat.

[00:03:27]Penicellin. Right off the bat, the good news is you can find the mold that produces penicellin in the Amazon. Yay.

[00:03:33]It's got a velvety texture with circular patches of blue green colonies, sometimes with white edges, and produces that classic moldy basement smell. If it's bright green or a haunting black, you best keep looking. Penicyium, the mold that produces penicellin, thrives in cool, shaded, moist habitats. Exactly what the rainforest was built for. It's easier to find than Waldo in a black and white picture, as it grows in practically anything from wet, decomposing log, fruit, caves, nuts, and seeds. All penicyium molds are not created equal, however. Alexander Fleming's original strain produced only micrograms of penicellin. A gram isn't much, and we're talking a millionth of a gram. To put it another way, a single modern penicellin pill contains 400,000 units of antibiotic. Fleming's entire month of work produced less than one usable unit. He could not even treat a mouse. This was only one of the problems he encountered, and it was partially fixed by someone very randomly in 1943 discovering a strain of penicyium growing on a cantaloupe in Illinois of all places that produced 200 times more penicellin. And when I say produce penicellin, that's because penicellin is something that the mold penicyium creates. The mold itself is not penicellin. And you need to create the right conditions for penicyium to produce penicellin. They produce this as a chemical weapon in circumstances where nutrients are scarce, competition is high, the mold is stressed, or the colony is aging. Modern industrial penicyium strains are mutated to produce penicellin all the time, even when conditions aren't ideal. But Julianne doesn't need industrial amounts of penicellin, which brings us to the other challenges Alexander Fleming faced.

[00:05:11]Penicyllium needs to stay around 73° F or 23 C, and you also need controlled fermentation, sterile conditions, precise pH and oxygen control, and purification equipment. I got a quick medium-siz announcement here. The YouTube algorithm despised my last few videos, which were a little less sciency and more fun. So, I just started a new channel for that kind of tom foolery.

[00:05:33]You are welcome to check it out. I've put links for it everywhere. I'll try to post on each channel regularly. Also, this a quick like and subscribe for the poor.

[00:05:44]None of this was possible in Alexander Fleming's lab in 1928. And sadly, it's not possible for Julianne who's dying in the Amazon either. She could kind of create some sterile equipment with her fire and possibly make a small hut that maintains a semiconstant temperature and possibly get around a lot of the obstacles. But even if she could overcome every other obstacle there is, one remains that keeps her from ever being able to make penicellin in the Amazon. And that is that even though the Amazon contains many species of penicyium, none of them produce meaningful amounts of penicellin like the one on that cantaloupe in Illinois.

[00:06:20]After years of experimenting with penicellin, Alexander Fleming himself said it was too unstable to be of practical use. So, how, you're wondering, did we end up with penicellin at every corner drugstore? Well, just as World War II kicked the development of nuclear technology into high gear, all the thousands of dying and injured soldiers during the war also spurred the need for a good antibiotic.

[00:06:43]Me and Mortar create the penicellin and no one gets hurt. That's how I assumed it happened, but turns out it was a bit more complicated. They put some penicellin in an itty bitty flask containing a sterile, nutrient-rich liquid broth. And once the penicyium began to multiply in there, this seed culture was transferred to a slightly bigger flask and on and on to larger tanks until they built up King Kong-sized fungal masses in massive multi,000galon industrial bioreactors that allowed for constant perfect temperature, nutrients, and oxygen. And after several days in there, it finally started to produce penicellin. This was then extracted, purified through various chemical processes, and converted into a crystallized form of penicellin. It took an army of scientists working on the penicellin problem several years to figure out how to grow usable amounts.

[00:07:33]Long story short, in this scenario, Julianne stays warm for a few days with her fire, but would succumb to the bacterial infection before she can reach civilization. Luckily, in real life, she didn't get leptosperosis. And after following a stream for a few days, she stumbled upon some lumberjacks who put her in a canoe for 11 hours where she finally made it to civilization where she was able to make a full recovery.

[00:07:56]Yay. Physically. Oh.