Alexander Fleming
"Alexander Fleming 3" — Photo by Calibuon at English Wikibooks, cropped by User:AlanM1 / Wikimedia Commons / CC0
A messy workspace paved the way for modern medicine.
In September 1928, Alexander Fleming returned to his London lab to find a petri dish of Staphylococcus contaminated by a Penicillium mould that had stopped the bacteria growing around it. He named the antibacterial substance penicillin. He shared the 1945 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery.
Did you know?
Fleming couldn't purify penicillin himself and largely set the work aside by 1931. It took Howard Florey and Ernst Chain in Oxford roughly a decade later to turn it into a usable drug.
I was a Scottish bacteriologist.
I famously missed the beauty of my own mistake until I looked closer.
I got a Nobel for it.
I spent my career chasing the secrets of staphylococci, thanks to a stray spore.
I named the substance "penicillin" — the first widely used antibiotic