Birth of Alexander Fleming

Alexander Fleming was born on 6 August 1881 in Lochfield. A Scottish bacteriologist, Fleming served as a doctor in the First World War and afterwards worked at St Mary's Hospital in London. In 1922 he discovered lysozyme, an antibacterial enzyme in tears and saliva, and in 1928 he noticed that a mould, Penicillium, had killed bacteria on a culture dish he had left out, leading him to identify penicillin. It was left to Howard Florey and Ernst Chain, in the late 1930s and 1940s, to develop it into a usable drug, and the three shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1945. Penicillin saved millions of lives, and Fleming warned early that misuse could produce resistant bacteria.

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