How did he discover penicillin?
Fleming, being a bacteriologist, was searching for cures to treat bacterial infections. One day in 1928 he discovered that bacteria he had been growing on a culture plate had been killed in an area close to where a mould was accidentally growing. He isolated the mould and showed that it released a substance that inhibited bacterial growth. He named the substance penicillin after the name of the mould. Fleming reported his ground-breaking results in the scientific paper “On the antibacterial action of cultures of a Penicillium with special reference to their use in the isolation of B. influenzae” published in British Journal of Experimental Pathology 10, 226-236 (1929).
