By Paolo Surico
When we think about wartime innovation, we usually imagine dramatic breakthroughs: Alan Turing’s cracking of the Nazi Enigma code, the invention of radar, the Manhattan Project’s development of the atomic bomb. But a less visible biological innovation – the mass production of penicillin – was just as transformative.
Although Alexander Fleming identified penicillin’s antibacterial properties in 1928, it remained fragile, unstable, and almost impossible to produce in meaningful quantities for more than a decade. It was only during WWII that penicillin was turned into a treatment that could be produced, distributed, and widely used.
The stakes could not have been higher. Estimates from military records indicate that during WWI, roughly 12-15% of soldiers wounded in battle died from bacterial infections. For some injuries – most notoriously femur fractures – mortality rates reached 80%, almost entirely due to post-wound complications.
By the final years of WWII, once the Allies began mass-producing penicillin, medical outcomes changed dramatically. Military records show infection recovery rates of around 95%, far surpassing the efficacy of earlier antiseptics and sulfa drugs. Mortality from comparable wound infections fell to roughly 3-4%, and penicillin is estimated to have prevented tens of thousands of amputations that previously would have been necessary to stop the spread of gangrene.
Mass production of penicillin was as consequential to the Allied war effort as any breakthrough in cryptography or nuclear physics. Despite its formidable scientific capacity, Germany failed to do so. Research efforts began late, remained confined to a handful of university labs, and stalled at the experimental stage, as Nazi scientists lacked access to high-yield strains, advanced fermentation methods, and the institutional coordination necessary for large-scale production.
The Allied experience was markedly different. From 1941 onward, the US mobilised its scientific and industrial infrastructure through Vannevar Bush’s Office of Scientific Research and Development, funding parallel research projects across universities, public laboratories, and private firms while absorbing the financial and scientific risks.
By adapting deep-tank fermentation techniques – originally developed for food processing and industrial chemistry – 21 American companies were able to produce millions of penicillin doses in time for D-Day.
Three features of the American innovation system proved decisive.
First, penicillin manufacturing could be scaled only because of sustained investment in civilian technologies developed long before the war, such as fermentation, and in microbiology and industrial engineering. Germany, despite its strength in synthetic chemistry, lacked the diversified industrial ecosystem needed to manufacture antibiotics at scale.
Second, the US innovation environment was shaped by a government willing to take risks. Through the Office of Scientific Research and Development, it financed a wide range of exploratory efforts, fully expecting many to fail. In doing so, it allowed the most promising approaches to emerge and scale. Germany’s more centralized research system, by contrast, emphasized immediate military payoff and discouraged open-ended experimentation.
Third, the US built an innovation system that, though dispersed, was highly integrated, linking public investment, academic discovery, and industrial execution. This division of labour gave the Allies a technological advantage that Nazi Germany, constrained by institutional rigidity, could not replicate.
Penicillin, initially justified as a defence investment, ultimately had as great an impact on the war as any weapon, and it transformed civilian medicine and global health.
In this sense, America’s most powerful wartime asset was not a particular technology but the system that made such breakthroughs possible.
That system did not emerge by accident. It was the product of deliberate policy decisions that aligned academic research, industrial capacity, and institutional development – a nexus that Donald Trump’s administration is jeopardizing by axing funding for basic research and targeted investment, especially for health (NIH) and science (NSF).
Today’s policymakers need to recall the lesson of penicillin’s wartime development: true security depends as much on fostering innovation as on weaponry.
The writer is Professor of Economics at London Business School