Why settle for producing actual - lifesaving - wartime penicillin when you can offer up to generations of gullible academics and journalists the simulacra of faked wartime penicillin success instead ?
After a war with so much evil done in the name of "Purity", the contrasting good done by Manhattan's 'impure' penicillin, made by 'impure' lifeforms, led postwar boomers to view their elders' world with newly skeptical eyes.