Penicillin and American power: what wartime innovation really takes

For several years, Professor Paolo Surico has been a prominent advocate for a more strategic, sustained approach to defence-related research, one rooted not in short-term projects or isolated breakthroughs, but in institutional strength, public leadership, and long-horizon investment. In his latest analysis, Surico draws on both historical evidence and his own academic research to make the case that technological power is ultimately a systems problem.

Writing for Project Syndicate, Surico revisits one of the most consequential yet under-appreciated innovations of the Second World War: the mass production of penicillin. Though its antibacterial properties were identified as early as 1928, penicillin only became a life-saving, widely available treatment once the Allied war effort mobilised public institutions, universities, and private industry at scale. The result was a medical transformation that dramatically reduced battlefield mortality, prevented tens of thousands of amputations, and accelerated recovery times, outcomes as strategically significant as any advance in cryptography or weapons technology.

Surico contrasts this success with Nazi Germany’s failure to industrialise penicillin production, despite strong scientific capabilities. The difference, he argues, was not ingenuity but institutional design. In the United States, the federal government absorbed early risk, funded parallel research paths, and coordinated academic discovery with industrial execution. Civilian technologies developed well before the war, such as fermentation and industrial microbiology, became decisive military assets once properly integrated into a national innovation system.

This argument reflects a broader finding from Surico’s own research. From semiconductors to biotechnology, America’s most transformative advances have consistently emerged from the same institutional framework: publicly funded basic research, strong universities, competitive firms capable of scaling innovation, and large social returns from investment in health and education. Penicillin, initially justified as a defence necessity, ultimately reshaped civilian medicine and global public health.

The lesson, Surico warns, remains urgent today. Narrow conceptions of security that prioritise weapons over research ecosystems risk undermining the very foundations of technological leadership. True resilience, he concludes, depends on deliberate policy choices that align research institutions, industrial capacity, and public investment, an alignment that history shows cannot be improvised in times of crisis.

Read the full article, “Penicillin and American Power,” by Professor Paolo Surico on Project Syndicate.