To steal a question from Chris Shinkle’s session at LKNA ’14, how many of us today would have discovered penicillin in our fast-paced, no-time-to-spare, unsafe to fail world?
Penicillin was discovered by Alexander Fleming in 1928 by accident when he returned from holiday and found a messy hospital lab waiting for him. Upon inspection of some petri dishes containing Staphylococcus aureus, he found that they had been infiltrated by a previously identified mold named Penicillium notatum. Upon closer inspection, he found that this mold had halted the growth of the Staph bacteria.
