After the news about the curative properties of penicillin broke in an editorial in The Times on 27 August 1942, Fleming enjoyed the publicity, but Howard Florey did not: he feared that this  would create a demand for penicillin that he did not yet have to give. When the press arrived at the Sir William Dunn School, he told his secretary to "send them packing". He also prohibited his team to speak to the press. Confusion resulted from the fact that both the mould juice and the drug produced from it were both called penicillin. Distorted and inaccurate accounts were published and broadcast giving Fleming credit for the development of penicillin, accounts that Fleming and St. Mary's Hospital made little or no effort to correct. The story the media wished to tell was the familiar one of the lone scientist and the serendipitous discovery. The British medical historian Bill Bynum later wrote:
In 1943, the Nobel committee received a single nomination for the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for Fleming and Florey from the British biochemist Rudolph Peters. The secretary of the Nobel committee, Göran Liljestrand, made an assessment of Fleming and Florey in the same year, but little was known about penicillin in Sweden at the time, and he concluded that more information was required. The following year, there was one nomination for Fleming alone and one for Fleming, Florey and Chain. Liljestrand and Nanna Svartz, the professor of medicine at the Karolinska Institute, considered their work, and while both judged Fleming and Florey equally worthy of a Nobel Prize, the Nobel committee was divided, and decided to award the prize that year instead to Joseph Erlanger and Herbert S. Gasser "for their discoveries relating to the highly differentiated functions of single nerve fibres". 
There were a large number of nominations for Florey and Fleming or both in 1945, and one for Chain, from Liljestrand, who nominated all three. Liljestrand noted that thirteen of the first sixteen nominations that came in mentioned Fleming, but only three mentioned him alone. This time evaluations were made by Liljestrand,  and , who endorsed all three.
There were rumours that the committee would award the prize to Fleming alone, or half to Fleming and one-quarter each to Florey and Chain. Fulton and Dale lobbied for the award to be given to Florey. The Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute did consider awarding half to Fleming and one-quarter each to Florey and Chain, but in the end decided to divide it equally three ways. On 25 October 1945, it announced that Fleming, Florey and Chain equally shared the 1945 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine "for the discovery of penicillin and its curative effect in various infectious diseases." When The New York Times announced that "Fleming and Two Co-Workers" had won the prize, Fulton demanded – and received – a correction in an editorial the next day.
Dorothy Hodgkin received the 1964 Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for her determinations by X-ray techniques of the structures of important biochemical substances." She became only the third woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, after Marie Curie in 1911 and Irène Joliot-Curie in 1935.