In 1928, a Scottish pharmacologist, with some untidy workshop etiquette, had returned to his London laboratory and noticed some mold growing on the bacterial plates he had left in the sink before he embarked on a two-week holiday. Thankfully for much of humankind, Alexander Fleming was an observant scientist, if not the neatest, and noticed that the mold growth inhibited the spread of the Staphylococcus strain that he was studying—penicillin was subsequently born and the world was vaulted into a new pharmaceutical drug age.
