Today is the birthday of Alexander Fleming, a Scottish bacteriologist born in 1881 who accidentally discovered penicillin, one of the most important drugs 20th century. A strange and rare mold Penicillium notatum happened to be floating around in the laboratory of Fleming because another researcher studied him. Fortunately, Fleming looked messy habit of keeping its longest bacterial plates than usual, and when he returned from a week of vacation in 1928, he discovered mold growth. He determined that a compound produced by the mold, which he called penicillin could kill pathogenic bacteria, but not white blood cells or tissues. The conclusion lay dormant until 1940, when chemists Ernst Chain and Howard Florey isolated, purified, and tested the antibiotic in clinical trials. Fleming, Florey and Chain then received the Nobel in medicine in 1945 prices
[Source:EmilyMcMurrayEd Notable Twentieth Century scientists (Gale Research Inc., ITP, 1995).]
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