NEW YORK: In years to come, penicillin will develop life saving and disease-fighting uses scarcely thought possible today, declared its discoverer, Sir Alexander Fleming, in an interview at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. Sir Alexander is visiting the United States on behalf of the British Government to discover if America uses penicillin better than Britain. He indicated that he was particularly interested in two aspects: the newly-developed method of administering penicillin by mouth and the search for a simpler method of injecting the drug.

[Meanwhile, as reported from London,] The popularity of bicycles has expanded everywhere except in North America where they have been ousted by motor cars. British bicycle manufacturers are likely to dominate the world markets, since the United States bicycle industry is much smaller than Britain’s, while the former chief competitors, Germany and Japan, are handicapped. The major importing countries, notably, India, plan to produce and assemble bicycles on a large scale but such countries must import many specialised components ... The pre-war British industry was the world’s largest with a production of two million complete machines plus components equalling another one and a half million. Exports in 1938 were 571,000 bicycles worth 1.7 million sterling.

Published in Dawn, June 4th, 2020