For the
first 2 million years or so of human history, bacterial
infections—pneumonia, scarlet fever, syphilis, festering
wounds—were often tantamount to a death sentence. But one London
morning, humanity got a dramatic reprieve when a Scottish researcher
named Alexander Fleming happened to glance at some Petri dishes about to
be sterilized for reuse and said, "That's funny." Fleming, who had seen
the horrors of infection during World War I, was searching for a safe,
powerful antibiotic. So far, he had found only a weak one, called
lysozyme, extracted from body fluids. But when he looked at the dishes,
Fleming noticed that the bacterial cultures within were dying off. The
killer: "mold juice," as he called it, the product of spores that had
probably wafted in from a lab downstairs. Fleming determined that the
spores were Penicillium notatum and renamed the juice penicillin.
However, it was a decade before other scientists took notice of
Fleming's work, purified penicillin and turned it into a miracle drug.
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