The Oil Drum

This site shows a fermentation process to make small quantities of penicillin. It doesn't address the problem of starting with a suitable penicillin strain or how to deal with the problem of foaming due to corn steep. Also make sure you have plenty of lactose on hand and don't forget the freeze dryer. Not as easy as making beer by any walk of the imagination.

http://eschatonmanagement.blogspot.com/2007/05/how-to-make-penicillin-ch...

And here's a pretty good history of its development. This shows how difficult making penicillin really was. Fleming who discovered it was unable to figure out how to extract and purify the penicillin. The penicillin was very unstable and freeze drying was the method used to obtain larger quantities. The first usage by the Oxford team showed very promising results, but the subject died 3 days after they ran out of their limited supplies.

http://acswebcontent.acs.org/landmarks/landmarks/penicillin/penicillin.h...

Be sure to flip through all the pages on this latter site if this subject interests you.

I'm not an expert, but plain penicillin may be quite useful in the future. There is generally some cost in robustness for an organism to adapt to anything, which is why most germs were NOT penicillin-resistant prior to WWII even though penicillin had evolved maybe a hundred million or more years ago (wild guess). Because the organisms using it were rare. By the same token, once most humans don't have it, regular strains of germs may get the upper hand over the so-called "supergerms" for the same reason they were more robust in the past. Stuff like MRSA is only "super" in the context of pervasive human antibiotic use, it's probably of lower efficiency than it was before to "buy" this adaptation.

The decentralization of medicine may not bode that well for "supergerms" and if few people have antibiotics, regular penicillin may well become quite useful again. It's a constant evolutionary tit-for-tat and microorganisms show it very directly due to their fast reproductive rate....

Indeed, it was recently found that some old "basic" antibiotics are useful against MRSA now... since they haven't been used much.

In nature, antibiotics are useful DUE TO BEING RARE, whether in bread mold, frog slime, etc. It is not energetically worth a germ's evolving to exploit the niche since it would pay a bigger cost in some other way. We know this is true because bread mold, frog skin, and all the other natural antibiotics still work after millions of years. They probably are periodically overwhelmed by bacteria if the owner gets too populous, and conserved within the organism's genome for later.

It's all about evolution.

ymmv

Pinealone, the good news about antibiotic resistance is that it is usually temporary, not permenant. If al penicillin derivatives were withdrawn from a medical community for 1 year, the suscetibility to penicillin would skyrocket. Many bacteria would eject the plasmid containing the penicillinase gene as it would no longer convey a competitive advantage, and simply consume energy (on a cellular level) transcribing into proteins. Thus, resistance is lost (until the use of penicillin resumes as a therapeutic intervention).