July 1, 2016

Alexander Fleming is credited with the discovery of penicillin; perhaps the greatest achievement in medicine in the 20th Century. In 1928, while studying influenza, Fleming noticed that mold had developed accidentally on a set of culture dishes being used to grow the staphylococci germ. The mold had created a bacteria-free circle around itself. Fleming grew the mold in a pure culture and found that it produced a substance that killed a number of pathogenic bacteria. After calling it "mold juice" for several months, he later named the substance penicillin in March of 1929, paving the way for the use of antibiotics in modern healthcare. The laboratory in which Fleming discovered and tested penicillin is preserved as the Alexander Fleming Laboratory Museum in St. Mary's Hospital, Paddington.