...in Dis­cov­er­ing the Mode of Ac­tion of Peni­cillin by Ted Park — The scene opens in 1943. I was a grad­u­ate stu­dent in fer­men­ta­tion bio­chem­istry at the Uni­ver­sity of Wis­con­sin in Madi­son. As this was at the height of World War II, most re­search projects were war-re­lated. My first as­sign­ment was no dif­fer­ent: to iden­tify mu­tants of Aer­obac­ter aero­genes that pro­duced im­proved yields of 2,3‑butylene gly­col (2,3‑butanediol), a po­ten­tial can­di­date...