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In 1906 the young physician Alexander Fleming became a research assistant at St Mary's Hospital in London. Fleming went to France during the First World War to treat wounded soldiers and could see for himself that there was no effective way of treating many infections. Back at St Mary's after the war, Fleming was determined to find a better way of killing germs. In 1928 he was studying staphylococci bacteria (that can, among other things, infect wounds). By pure luck, he noticed that on a dish containing agar on which he had been growing germs, near some mould, the germs were less common. He grew more of the mould, naming it penicillin from its Latin name Penicillium.

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16y ago

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