WIRED, March 20, 2012
There’s a moment in the history of medicine that’s so cinematic it’s a wonder no one has put it in a Hollywood film. The scene is a London laboratory. The year is 1928. Alexander Fleming, a Scottish microbiologist, is back from a vacation and is cleaning up his work space. He notices that a speck of mold has invaded one of his cultures of Staphylococcus bacteria. It isn’t just spreading through the culture, though. It’s killing the bacteria surrounding it.
Fleming rescued the culture and carefully isolated the mold. He ran a series of experiments confirming that it was producing a Staphylococcus-killing molecule.
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