The Mould That Saved Millions: Discovery of Penicillin
1928 · event
Alexander Fleming returned from holiday to find mould killing bacteria in a forgotten petri dish. That accident became penicillin, and no single discovery has saved more lives since. Someone you love is alive because of it.
Fleming himself could not stabilise the mould's "juice", that took Florey, Chain and Heatley in Oxford a decade later, growing the culture in hospital bedpans and extracting penicillin drop by precious drop. Their first patient improved miraculously, and died when the supply ran out.
By D-Day, Allied factories were producing enough to treat every wounded soldier. Fleming's warning in his Nobel lecture, that careless use would breed resistant bacteria, was made in 1945, and is the exact problem medicine faces today.