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 ?
The OSRD and Vannevar Bush were never better alchemists than when it came to using lots of taxpayers' money and their control over secret files to cook up a plausible cover story for their failure to synthesize penicillin and their years of bitter opposition to the natural production of penicillin.
Losers, with money, to paraphrase Jacque Parizeau, write history...