On the 61st anniversary of Alexander Fleming’s death,we are on the road back to where he started: the days of people dying from common infections and injuriesIn 1928, as Alexander Fleming was sorting through a pile of petri dishes that he’d been cultivating bacteria in, and he noticed something strange. Mold growing in one of the dishes had created a bacteria-free circle around itself. After taking samples of the mold he found it belonged to the penicillium family. Fleming had accidentally stumbled across penicillin,the first antibiotic.
Although Fleming published a paper on the new discovery, it was largely ignored until the 1940s and the onset of World War II. With positive tests in mice and humans showing the exact power of penicillin, and the US government actively pushed industry into the mass production of the drug. By the end of the war,U.
S. companies were making more than 650 billion units a month, which saved tens of thousands of lives then and millions since.
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Source: theguardian.com