Quote of the day: penicillin frustration

For some reason, I was reading about the scaling-up of penicillin and came across this wonderful quote, via an ACS writeup:

Pfizer's John L. Smith captured the complexity and uncertainty facing these companies during the scale-up process: "The mold is as temperamental as an opera singer, the yields are low, the isolation is difficult, the extraction is murder, the purification invites disaster, and the assay is unsatisfactory."

You know, that gives me a bit of perspective.