Sir Fleming's Moldy Dish
1928
1928 1928
00.15W51.30N
SCI

LONDON, ENGLAND
	If Sir Alexander Fleming hadn't been paying close attention, he might have washed out his moldy lab dish and gone on with his work.  But if he had done that, thousands of people would not be alive today.
	While working in the lab in 1928, the British scientist saw that mold had contaminated his dish of staphylococcus bacteria, but he also noticed a ring of dead bacteria around the mold.  Fascinated, he investigated further and called his discovery "penicillin."
	In the late 1930s British scientists extracted penicillin from the mold and in 1941 cured a policeman with blood poisoning.
	Penicillin came just in time to save thousands of lives during World War II, and additional thousands thereafter.  And while it is still widely used, many strains of bacteria have grown resistant to the drug.
