Alexander Fleming tea towel

Alexander Fleming (1881-1955) was a Scottish physician and microbiologist, best known for discovering the world’s first broadly effective antibiotic, which he named ‘penicillin’. 

“One sometimes finds what one is not looking for,” he wrote. “When I woke up just after dawn on September 28, 1928, I certainly didn’t plan to revolutionise all medicine by discovering the world’s first antibiotic, or bacteria killer. But I suppose that was exactly what I did.”

His discovery in 1928 has been called the “single greatest victory ever achieved over disease”. For this discovery, he shared the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1945 with Howard Florey and Ernst Chain, who developed penicillin into a useful drug. He was knighted in 1944 and in 1999 was named in Time magazine’s list of the ‘100 Most Important People of the 20th Century’.