The First Antibiotic
"When I woke up just after dawn on September 28, 1928, I certainly didn't plan to revolutionise all medicine by discovering the world's first antibiotic, or bacteria killer." These are Scottish scientist Sir Alexander Fleming's memories of the day when he was working as a bacteriologist and he happened to notice as he was about to flush away some mould growing on one of his specimens of bacteria that where the mould had grown the staphylococci bacteria had disappeared. Within a month, he had replicated the results several times and was convinced that penicillin mould could kill all the commonly deadly bacteria around at that time.

Fleming was also the first doctor to use anti-typhoid vaccine on a human patient and he is credited with the discovery of the antiseptic properties of lysozyme found in tears, body fluids and certain plants. Fleming shared the 1945 Nobel Prize in Medicine with Howard Florey and Ernst Chain, the two chemists who had perfected a method of producing penicillin.