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As Australia seeks to forge a national identity in the year 2001, it is timely to remember that there have been some remarkable achievements in science, technology and industry. One of the most notable is the development of penicillin as a wartime project, to which Australians made major contributions. Australians, during and immediately after the war, contributed so much to the scientific identification and purification of penicillin, and to the industrial scaling-up in its production at the Commonwealth Serum Laboratories in Melbourne. And yet the nascent antibiotic industry was allowed to run down and it eventually disappeared by the end of the 1970s. This case is concerned to tease out the puzzle posed by this contrast in aspirations, between the highest levels of scientific and technical achievement in bringing penicillin into widespread use (Australia being the first country in the world to provide penicillin to the civilian population in 1944) and shockingly poor performance in sustaining and developing a national industry. As the stirrings of a biotechnology industry may be observed in Australia in the year 2001, the lessons of this earlier experience must not be lost.