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Fleming stumbled across the Penicillium bacterium by accident; he didn't mean to create the drug. When he discovered that the mold could kill other bacteria in a Petri dish, he wondered if the same could happen inside the human body, and started experimenting until he came up with penicillin. Now, penicillin is one of the most widely-used antibiotics.

The drug was named after the mold it comes from, Penicillium. The mold looks like a brush under the microscope, and "penicillus" means "small brush" in Latin.

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