The Magic of Penicillin
Penicillin is one of the most important medicinal discoveries in the history of humankind. If you are unfamiliar with penicillin, let us give you a quick rundown. Penicillin was basically discovered by accident back in 1933, and it was the world’s first antibiotic.
You have probably used an antibiotic before and thought nothing of it – after a dental surgery or for a basic infection, but the truth is that antibiotics, and penicillin specifically, sort of saved humanity and greatly extended our life expectancy. Before penicillin was discovered, people used to die from everything. Remember back in the good old days when people died from sepsis and gangrene, or from horrible spouts of diarrhea? This was because there was no modern medicine.
At its core, penicillin is used to treat infections. When you get cut or have an open wound, and that cut or wound gets infected, the infection spreads throughout your system and can cause death pretty quickly. Think about septic shock for example. You might not have heard of someone dying by septic shock recently, but that’s because we have ways to prevent it now – by treating a wound with penicllin, sepsis can be prevented altogether, avoiding the danger entirely.
Until 1933, anyone who got an infection was pretty much on their own – you might live or you might die, but nobody could really do anything about it. Even the nobility of Europe frequently died from simple wounds because they got infected and antibiotics had not been invented yet. The only reason human beings don’t really die from ordinary cuts or an infected wounds anymore is because of the discovery of penicillin (and the other antibiotics that followed)
Penicillin is a “magical” medicine that actually helps to do more than just fight off potentially deadly infections caused by cuts and wounds. Penicillin can be used to treat diseases like pneumonia, meningitis, anthrax, chlamydia, Lyme disease, abscesses, and even tetanus. It cannot be stressed how important of a discovery this antibiotic was.
Homemade Penicillin and the Apocalypse
As you can likely imagine, the end of the world will come with some level of scarcity in resources. If for whatever reason society collapses, chances are the drug stores will be amongst the first places to be looted. Within months, medicine will be in short supply. Things will go back to the way they were in medieval times, with people dying from simple conditions that could have otherwise been healed through modern medicine.
In times like these, the possession of something like penicillin is invaluable. If you can learn how to make penicillin at home, you have a tool for trading and bartering, as well as a tool to medically treat yourself or your family in case of an infection.
To give you an idea of how valuable penicillin was when it first came about in the early 20th century, patients who are being treated with penicillin often had their urine collected just so that it could be reused on other patients. In times of disaster and calamity, antibiotics might become even more valuable than commonly recommended barter items like ammunition, weapons or gold.
Just keep in mind that penicillin does not treat so called “super bugs”. Nowadays many strains of bacteria are antibiotic resistant, and that includes resistance to penicillin. Penicillin will also not treat every kind of infection, particularly viral infections. Antibiotics do not work on viruses, and using antibiotics while you have a viral infection is actually quite dangerous. The primary purpose of penicillin is to treat an infection that occurs with an open wound or injury. Without it, a blood infection might follow and that could mean death.
How to Make Penicillin at Home
Before we start, we must warn you that this is an incredibly precarious project. Following instructions for how to make penicillin at home is not easy. We’re talking about making antibiotics in your house with nothing but a few ingredients. This is not like making homemade gunpowder or homemade survival food. This is complex, and it’s medicine that you’ll ingest – so if you mess it up, who knows what could happen.
You should under no circumstances use your homemade penicillin unless it is a dire emergency. Unless the world has exploded, keep this instruction manual in your toolkit for when you need it. And even if something horrible were to happen and you were to become infected, this homemade penicillin should be an absolute last resort. You’d definitely turn to scavenged/looted antibiotics first before attempting to use any form of homemade antibiotic.
Here’s the entire list of the ingredients and equipment you’ll need to do this. Once again, this is not and easy process. It is long and arduous, and requires a decent amount of specialized equipment. It’s not necessarily something we recommend that you try to do, except as a “trial run” or experiment so that you’re familiar with the process if you ever end up needing this skill.
Ingredients required for homemade penicillin
- Homemade bread, orange peels, or cantaloupe skins
- Potatoes (unpeeled)
- Distilled water
- Glucose (sometimes called dextrose) – can be substituted with plain white sugar in a pinch
- Gelatin or agar
- Distilled water
- Citric acid
- Sea salt
- Yeast extract
- Powdered milk
- Hydrochloric acid
- Ethyl acetate
- Potassium acetate
Equipment needed for homemade penicillin:
- Various sizes of container, some with air-tight lids
- Petri dishes or other shallow containers (ideally with lids but plastic wrap can be used as lids if needed)
- Paperclips or paperclip-like wire (sterilized)
- Separator funnel
- Measuring cylinder
- Laboratory/Erlenmeyer flask (typical laboratory flask you’d see in a chemistry lab)
- Cheesecloth or other cloth that allows water through but not solids (sterilized)
The Easy Part: Making Natural Penicillin
Step 1: Grow Some Fungus
The first step is undoubtedly the easiest. The first thing you need to do is grow some fungus. Take a slice of bread and expose it to the open air, storing it in a dark place with normal humidity that is roughly 70 degrees Fahrenheit. You need to store the bread in a sterilized environment until a mold develops. This will generally take anywhere from one to two weeks.
Your mold will first turn gray, then it will begin turning bright blue/green. Once it has become a nice shade of blue-green, you need to cut the bread into chunks and then put those chunks inside of a pre-sterilized container of some sort. Keep the bread pieces incubated inside of the container for another full week in the exact same conditions. The container should be covered but not air tight.
As a side note, you can also make penicillin using peels from oranges or skins from a cantaloupe if needed. It is also recommended that you use homemade bread when you do this. Bread bought (or scavenged, depending on what kind of world you’re living in) from the store generally contains additives that inhibit the growth of mold, including penicillin.
Step 2: Preparing to Re-Culture your Penicillin
The mold you currently have in your container contains penicillin. There are many survivalists out there who claim this mold is natural penicillin, and that it can be used immediately to treat certain conditions. Do not do this. While this super moldy bread you have probably does contain some “natural” penicillin, who knows what else is in there. If you make a tea out if this and drink it, not only is the penicillin going to be too weak to do anything, you’re also ingesting mold – so it could also make you sick.
However, I regret to inform you that this is not the case. Rubbing mold onto your wound will not treat sepsis. It might do something to the bacteria that is on the surface of your flesh, but it won’t do anything more than surface level. Making tea out of the mold also won’t do you any good.
To get the real benefits of penicillin, it must be further cultured from the mold. This requires a good amount of further work.
First you need to slice 200 grams of (unpeeled) potatoes into thin pieces and put them inside a mason jar or other container with an air tight lid. Fill it with distilled water. Screw on the lid and place the entire mason jar inside a pot of boiling water, then boil the pot for 30 full minutes.
Once the container or mason jar is cooled, you can open it. You will need to strain the contents of the mason jar through either a sterilized lace curtain or a cheesecloth, whatever you have handy – basically any cloth that water can get through is fine as long as it’s sterilized beforehand. Be sure to catch all the liquid, as this will be the “broth” of the penicillin.
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Take the liquid and add 20 grams of glucose. If you do not have glucose, you can also use the plain old sugar from your pantry. Then you want to add 20 grams of (agar or gelatin) to the liquid mixture. Because Agar is pretty thick, you will notice it does not completely dissolve, but this is not an issue. Basically you’re making some sort of potato and sugar jelly.
Now add distilled water into the mixture until the full volume of all the combined ingredients is approximately 1 liter. Next, pour your broth into shallow containers that have resealable lids. You’re aiming for something that resembles a petri dish – like the kind you see in movies, or that you might have used in chemistry or biology when in school. If you don’t have any of those, shallow bowls, small plates, or shallow tupperware will also work. If using a regular plate or bowl, you’ll have to use cling film to seal your “petri dishes”. Be sure that you cover the dishes immediately so that nothing in the air can get to it.
Step 3: Grow Your Cultures
You must move the penicillin mold into the Petri dishes you have just made. The exact method used by scientists is known as “streaking,” but what you are really doing is growing cultures. You will be using the mold from your penicillin fungus-infested bread mixed with the juices in your petri dishes to literally grow penicillin.
First you need a thin strip of wire. Any kind of wire will do, so long as it is thin like a paper clip. You want to bend the tip into a kind of Oval shape, then sterilize it with a flame until it is red hot.
Now dip your hot wire into your broth to cool it. Too much heat can instantly kill your penicillin spores, and your batch of penicillin will be dead before it ever gets started growing. With your wire sterilized and cooled, poke the blue/green penicillin mold with its tip. This will collect your mold spores. Then you will need to make 3 clear lines in each petri dish. Each line will become the birthplace of a small batch of penicillin.
Step 4: Let it Grow
This step does not involve any work. You simply need to let the penicillin grow inside of your makeshift petri dishes. This should take about a week. You will know you have penicillin when your petri dishes have filled with a yellow substance.
Do keep in mind that other types of bacteria can be colored yellow, and the only way to know for sure that you have penicillin is by using a microscope. In an apocalyptic situation, you will just have to go with your gut on this one. If you’ve been careful about following the steps laid out here, including sterilizing everything as suggested, then what you have should be penicillin.
How to Make Penicillin at Home: The Difficult “Sciencey” Part
Step 5: Fermenting
Once you have dishes full of penicillin spores that have grown out of the broth you put in the petri dishes, it is time to ferment them. You need to reproduce the penicillin spores in massive numbers. This will give you enough penicillin to actually work with in a survival situation.
This is where things get extremely complicated. The proper way of making penicillin involves a lot of ingredients that are not widely available during an apocalypse. Where are you going to find potassium monophosphate after the world has collapsed?
The method we have prepared for fermenting is quite a bit easier than some others, and all of the ingredients are available online for pretty reasonable prices. If you’re collecting supplies for a survival shelter or prepping for a bug-in scenario, and you want the ability to make quick penicillin, we’ll reiterate than you need to keep a small supply of the following ingredients and equipment on hand:
Ingredients/Equipment
- Measuring cylinder
- Laboratory/Erlenmeyer flask (typical laboratory flask you’d see in a chemistry lab)
- Distilled water
- Glucose (sometimes called dextrose)
- Citric acid
- Sea salt
- Yeast extract
- Powdered milk
- Hydrochloric acid
- Ethyl acetate
- Potassium acetate
- Separator funnel
Sterilize your flask inside heat (oven preferably) at 315 degrees for one hour. While your flask is sterilizing, put one teaspoon each of glucose, citric acid, yeast, milk powder, and sea salt into the graduated cylinder. Then fill the cylinder with water until you have approximately 100 milliliters of fluid inside the container.
Pour the liquid from your cylinder into the sterilized flask. Put a lid on the flask and shake the container until everything is dissolved. Now you can add your penicillin (from the petri dishes) into the flask. Keep in mind that you always want to be doing this in a sterile environment, – that means sterilizing all your equipment. For example, you’ll want to use a sterilized metal scoop or spatula to add your penicillin cultures to the liquid in the flask.
Now cover the flask quickly with aluminum foil to keep bad microbes outside while still enabling air to flow into the flask. Now you must let the flask sit for about 8 or 10 days while the penicillin grows.
Step 6: Extract and Adjust the Penicillin
After about 8 or 10 days you’ll be left with fermented penicillin. You will see there are some solid parts in the liquid, and these need to be separated out. The liquid is what contains the penicillin. You need to find a coffee filter or a sterilized cheesecloth and use it to strain the penicillin liquid into a sterile container.
Once you’ve strained out the liquid, it’s time to adjust the pH level of the penicillin (if needed). This is obviously very difficult to do without a proper pH tester. You will also need hydrochloric acid, and you will need to drop one small drip after another while testing the pH level until it becomes approx. 2.2.
What you will be left with is impure penicillin. While you could use this right away, it is not pure enough to be fully effective. Basically in this form it can work, but is pretty unreliable. You must perform one further extraction method using ethyl acetate to extract pure penicillin, that way you have a stable antibiotic that will really work.
Step 7: Purify the Penicillin
You are going to need some strange chemicals, potassium acetate and ethyl acetate, along with a separator funnel (the chemistry lab funnels that you use to separate two different liquids). All these ingredients are available at online retailers.
Basically what you’re doing here is dissolving the penicillin (but none of the other stuff) into the ethyl acetate, then evaporating the ethyl acetate by adding the potassium acetate, leaving you with nothing but the purified penicillin.
Here’s how you do this:
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First chill your ethyl acetate inside a freezer. Then, mix your chilled ethyl acetate with the penicillin liquid inside of your separator funnel. You will need to shake these two ingredients together for about half a minute, then let them separate. The ethyl acetate will float to the bottom, carrying with it the purified penicillin and leaving everything else separate.
Now open the separator funnel and remove the ethyl acetate by allowing it to drip into a sterile container of some sort. Once the ethyl acetate/penicllin mixture has drained fully, you will need to add the potassium acetate to the ethyl acetate mixture. Use about 1 gram of potassium acetate per 100 millilitres of liquid solution.
You’re finished. Leave the solution sitting in a well-ventilated area and in a few hours the ethyl acetate will evaporate and all that will be left is (roughly) 100 milligrams of pure penicillin. If you really want penicillin that works, keep in mind that most infections need about 250 milligrams every 12 hours for 10 days to be properly treated. That’s 5,000mg of penicillin! So you can do this in bigger batches or you can do a lot of batches, but we’ve kept it as simple as possible for you in the instructions above so at least you know the whole process.
If you want to guarantee access to penicillin in a post-disaster world, you’ll want most of the “scientific” supplies on hand both in your home and in any kind of emergency survival cache/bunker that you might have access to.
Final Thoughts on Homemade Penicillin
In our modern world, antibiotics are reasonably cheap and easy to access, so we strongly urge you not to rely on homemade penicillin except in a genuine catastrophe. However, knowing how penicillin is made can be a useful, potentially life-saving skill to have in your back pocket in the case of a real SHTF situation (here’s what SHTF means if you aren’t familiar with survival terms) (here’s what SHTF means if you aren’t familiar with survival terms). In a post apocalyptic disaster, penicillin can serve as both a form of improvised medicine and an extremely valuable bartering item. We encourage you to try making homemade penicillin at least once as an experiment/science project. Think of it as a dry run in case you ever have to do it for real. Just make sure you don’t use your homemade penicillin unless conventional medicine is genuinely unavailable.
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