When penicillin was just introduced a week's course was about $100,000 in today's money. Today its better derivatives are sometimes given away for free.
That particular problem was solved by a mold-covered cantaloupe from Peoria, Illinois.
"After a worldwide search in 1943, a mouldy cantaloupe in a Peoria, Illinois market was found to contain the best strain of mould for production using the corn steep liquor process."
Reviewing a larger section of the wiki, the Peoria cantelope certainly seems to have helped.
"On March 14, 1942, the first patient was treated for streptococcal sepsis with US-made penicillin produced by Merck & Co. Half of the total supply produced at the time was used on that one patient, Anne Miller. By June 1942, just enough US penicillin was available to treat ten patients. In July 1943, the War Production Board drew up a plan for the mass distribution of penicillin stocks to Allied troops fighting in Europe. The results of fermentation research on corn steep liquor at the NRRL allowed the United States to produce 2.3 million doses in time for the invasion of Normandy in the spring of 1944. After a worldwide search in 1943, a mouldy cantaloupe in a Peoria, Illinois market was found to contain the best strain of mould for production using the corn steep liquor process. Pfizer scientist Jasper H. Kane suggested using a deep-tank fermentation method for producing large quantities of pharmaceutical-grade penicillin. Large-scale production resulted from the development of a deep-tank fermentation plant by chemical engineer Margaret Hutchinson Rousseau. As a direct result of the war and the War Production Board, by June 1945, over 646 billion units per year were being produced."
It sure did, just pointing out that there was way more involved in engineering a cheap mass-manufacturing process than scavenging at markets. Somewhere near that section is a sentence on X-ray irradiation to induce mutations, just imagine the trial and error in that, and then these labour-intensive scaling experiments.
