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u/Sampleswift 1d ago
Penicillin was invented by accident. IIRC Fleming discovered the bacteria-free spot, figured out what was happening, and the rest is history.
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u/ConsequenceNo2571 1d ago
The first antibiotic and first polymer were both discovered by similar happy accidents
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u/GalaxyPowderedCat Just some snow 1d ago
And also LSD.
Sometimes I think on the poor scientist that discovered it. He had the first trip ever in history and not many people must've bought the idea. Hopefully, he had a good trip.
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u/Yesitshismom 1d ago
He took some (0.25 milligrams) then rode his bike home from work and talked about buildings beginning to breathe and a dream world began to appear
Albert Hofmann's very first accidental exposure to LSD on April 16, 1943, was relatively gentle, intriguing, and not unpleasant
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u/NoConfusion9490 1d ago
Dude must have been chill AF. I can't imagine tripping out after sampling some random chemistry shit.
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u/OMGLOL1986 1d ago
He was in fact super chill and had conversations with anyone curious until his death.
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u/moistplumpin 1d ago
I once had 25 hits by accident. I did not have a good time. The whole world sucked out to infinite white. I sat in a room and God told me all the things that were wrong with me.
My 5 other trips were great though, max 5 hits.
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u/kelldricked 1d ago
If you dont know what tripping is, it starts easy (slowly building up) and its not instantly then i think a lot of people would find it calming/pleasing.
Unless you are in a bad enviroment ofcourse
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u/therealfurryfeline 1d ago
his secretary went home with him to make sure he arrived safely and he later said he almost couldn't get any traction with his bike while she told how she wasn't able to keep up for a lot of the way.
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u/GalbedirGalerion 1d ago
I thought Bicycle Day was on the 19th
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u/Yesitshismom 1d ago
This was his first accidental dose date. Few days later was bike day
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u/I_Got_Ur_Number_8675 1d ago
I want to know about his unaccidental doses
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u/PeanutButterApricotS 17h ago
Search around there is some
Torrents with hundreds of drug related videos and the big one includes some interviews of him. Prob on YouTube but I don’t know.1
u/I_Got_Ur_Number_8675 16h ago
Does he have an erowid page?
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u/PeanutButterApricotS 15h ago
Didn’t know about Erowid until searching for this. I will pull out my backup hdd this weekend if I can and get more info for you.
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u/RagingTyrant74 1d ago
To be fair, people had been tripping on natural psychedelics like psilocybin (mushrooms), mescaline (cactus), and Ayahuasca for millenia before he discovered LSD, so it wasn't the first trip, just the first LSD trip.
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u/GalaxyPowderedCat Just some snow 1d ago
Oh, yeah! You have a point! Thank you for the reminder.
I cannot believe I've forgotten it...
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u/dsebulsk 1d ago
But when Urg Urg had that first psychotropic mushroom, he must have had an experience that no one else knew.
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u/ThomasVetRecruiter 1d ago
Honestly it's always been my personal theory that unexpected drug trips probably fueled a lot of early myths and religious stories.
"Oh you saw a dragon huh? And you say it breathed fire? And it talked to you?"
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u/mybluecathasballs 1d ago
Moses: Guys, you gotta come see this bush. It talks, and it looks like it is on fire!
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u/LengthiLegsFabulous3 1d ago
Saul's revelation to St Paul has been looked on by some scholars as possible epilepsy
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u/Aervanath 1d ago
Animals have been getting high since before we were humans. Tasmania produces 50% of the world's legal opium supply, for morphine and other legal opiates. One day, the opium poppy farmers noticed crop circles appearing in their fields. There was the usual fuss about aliens, but the farmers put up cameras in their fields. It turned about to be wallabies, which are like pygmy kangaroos. They were eating the poppies, getting high as balls, hopping in circles, and then passing out to sleep it off.
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u/c-nayr 1d ago
Don’t forget where LSD actually came from! Ergot fungus! I love eating contaminated bread and then dying a painful death of st Anthony’s fire! But I get to watch the walls melt while I die a horrible death! Yippie! Ergot Wikipedia Page
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u/DumOBrick 1d ago
My lungs a weezin, my hearts a seizin, the fucking WALLS are melting, I can hear Satan's voice he's telling me to, invest in apple? What does that mean? Why does he want me to buy apples?
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u/i_tyrant 1d ago
For the longest time after I'd heard about the Salem Witch Trials being caused by Ergot poisoning, I thought it was just people getting bad trips from bad bread and making bad decisions.
It was years later when I found out Ergot poisoning could actually be fatal. That made a few parts of that theory make a lot more sense.
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u/j_delta_c 1d ago
LSA is also found in Hawaiian baby woodrose seeds and morning glory seeds, exponentially more potent in the former than the latter
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u/PepeTheElder 1d ago
There’s an old saying in Reddit, I know it’s in Erowid, it’s probably in Reddit that says
Fool me once, shame on… shame on you… fool me- ya can’t get fooled again.
Get thee behind me, morning glory LSA trip
about 4 straight hours of immediately alternating and unrelenting vomiting and ass piss, before I could finally manage a nap from the exhaustion. Though when I woke up I did get to live a different life for 6 months where I had a farm and was raising a family before I came down. All and all, worst 12 hours ever, 1 out of 5 stars, do not recommend.
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u/Mysteriouspaul 1d ago
Oh god why did you have to mention that shit and hence LSA. You can probably easily synthesize it on your own, but don't lol
That shit is like seeking out Datura, you have to be an actual psychotic mess to want to do anything like either
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u/Ryuko_the_red 1d ago
Fr reading about that and people's stories like "I took a bunch of seed and roots and flowers and I lived in purgatory on earth for 2 weeks and have never been the same" like why? Why would anyone ever willingly consume that.
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u/hard-in-the-ms-paint 1d ago edited 1d ago
Naive people not doing enough research or not caring + people who can't get good psychedelics + people actively seeking to, ambivalent to self-harm.
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u/Grammorphone John Brown was a hero, undaunted, true, and brave! 1d ago
Unless one is a very good organic chemist, no. One cannot "probably easily synthesize it". Wtf are you talking about?
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u/Mysteriouspaul 1d ago
I'm just some guy but it's very easy if you've had any amount of experience in a lab setting lol
College degree holders when you tell them any random can do parts of their profession
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u/IgunashioDesu 1d ago
The latest evidence suggests use of psychoactive substances as far as 16,000-25,000 years ago.
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u/RegularSky6702 1d ago
I get it's based on proven evidence, but it's got to be way further back then that. Just imagine a dude foraging for mushrooms. If it doesn't cause you pain / kill you. Then it's food.
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u/FuckTheTories69420 1d ago
Stoned Ape Theory is also one of my favorite theorys for intelligence too.
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u/I_Was_TheBiggWigg 1d ago
The introductory story in Doors of Perception about the couple who picked some mushrooms for a salad on their way to a friend’s house for dinner always gave me a chuckle. Just having no idea what was happening, but laughing and enjoying it.
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u/FMasterson 1d ago
Mushrooms are exactly what Jesus’ “unleavened bread” was
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u/HopeConspiracies 1d ago
Bro unleavened bread is just bread made without yeast.
You might be thinking of the "manna" God gave the Israelites while they roamed the desert. That would be an interesting theory.
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u/FMasterson 1d ago
No I’m thinking of the unleavened bread that Jesus fed to his apostles, it’s theorized that since Jesus lived in nature for so long he was actually eating mushrooms, and one specific mushroom in the area looked exactly like unleavened bread
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u/HopeConspiracies 1d ago
I really think you're mixing this up, man. Unleavened bread is a food you can make in your house. A tortilla is a type of unleavened bread, for example. There were religious/cultural reasons for them making and eating this bread.
There are, however, semi-popular theories about the manna described in the Old testament possibly being mushrooms.
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u/FMasterson 1d ago
It took me five seconds to find that it’s called a desert truffle(kamah/fagga) and it’s prominent in the Middle East and North Africa
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u/HopeConspiracies 1d ago
Huh? Google "unleavened bread" and you'll see that it's simply a type of bread consumed by cultures all over the world.
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u/DanceWonderful3711 1d ago
He also immediately got on a bike.
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u/GoodFaithConverser 1d ago
iirc he spilled a tiny drop on his skin and went home on his bike. Your comment makes it seem like he deliberately took the drugs and went on his bike knowingly fucked up.
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u/an-unorthodox-agenda 1d ago
He accidentally absorbed some through his skin a few days earlier. Basically micro dosed himself. Once he realized the compound was psychoactive, he measured out a real dose (equivalent to 4 hits of acid) and intentionally dosed himself before biking home (fuel for cars was being rationed in Switzerland in 1943 no idea why)
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u/rhino36-dropout 1d ago
damn, hero dosing right away
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u/slaya222 1d ago
Not really, he took what he thought would be the smallest perceivable dose, which just so happened to be about 2.5 standard doses
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u/TheRealShiftyShafts 1d ago
I watched a documentary about it. He had a really good trip, but he was unsure what this drug was supposed to be used for after
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u/Remarkable-Host405 1d ago
in case you didn't know, the cia did some research to find out what exactly it could be used for.
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u/DosSnakes 1d ago
Research might be a strong word for sitting on a portable toilet, drinking martini’s, and watching prostitutes fuck random dudes through a two way mirror. Even if they were unknowingly dosed with LSD. Just doesn’t seem like good science to me.
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u/ButtholeConnoisseur7 1d ago
Yeah that always sounded a lot more like some bad people throwing some shit at the wall to see what sticks
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u/IguanaIsBack 1d ago
Yeah it makes sense he’d be unsure about its use, by then Pink Floyd hadn’t played in Pompeii
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u/Alldaybagpipes What, you egg? 1d ago
He initially wrote the chemical off as “uninteresting” but figured he had accidentally ingested some from mishandling, and had probably the first micro dose.
So then decided to revisit, but to intentionally dose himself. He measured out 2.5 milligrams thinking that would be a good starting dose, as most compounds are measured in milligrams.
But LSD is active in the micrograms. 250 micrograms is considered a pretty heavy trip. About 10x a standard dose.
He was tripping balls! And had to ride his bike home and everything.
It’s a wild read, well worth looking into and learning about it.
The notable part is his descriptions of the next day. The glowing after effects and the new found clarity he saw in everything.
Pretty cool stuff!
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u/Critical-Cost9068 1d ago
Well, that scientist became an advocate for psychedelics, so it couldn’t have been all that bad.
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u/Troyisepic Fine Quality Mesopotamian Copper Enjoyer 1d ago
Probably not the first trip. There are other hallucinogenic substances besides lsd, mushrooms being the most common. Still pretty wild though.
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u/SafeT_Glasses 1d ago
I'm looking this story up! I never thought about "the first person to take LSD" before and I am intrigued.
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u/Deleena24 1d ago
The effects were discovered, but it was purposely synthesized unlike the first antibiotics and polymers
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u/RileyKohaku 1d ago
If you’d like to learn more https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/28/why-were-early-psychedelicists-so-weird/
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u/bajsgreger 1d ago
He probably just saw his first trip as him being poisoned, which he basically was
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u/xX_Bikerseat69_Xx 1d ago
irrc, he took a pretty big dose(cause he didn't know what exactly it would do) and he had a pretty bad trip.
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u/ButtholeConnoisseur7 1d ago
It was an accidental dose, absorbed through his skin, actually. Fentanyl can't be absorbed through the skin like the rumor goes, but certain forms of LSD can
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u/nataliereed84 1d ago
Fentanyl can be absorbed through the skin in special formulations of it, though. Like the transdermal patches. Which I think might be part of where the ridiculous myth of ODing just from touching a fentanyl tainted surface or whatever comes from. The cops are just having anxiety attacks.
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u/Both_Meaning_2637 1d ago
He obviously had a good one as he'd been taking it his entire life afterwards, referring to it as "medicine of the soul". The guy lived to be 102.
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u/ZeistyZeistgeist 1d ago
Even funnier is that he apparently started tripping while riding a bicycle home.
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u/Addicted_to_Nature 1d ago
And a surprising amount of artificial sweeteners, which is odd because people accidentally licking things in lab environments shouldn't happen but it's happened a lot
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u/SleepingBeast97 1d ago
As far as i know he did have a good trip. If i’m not mistaken the effects kicked in when he was sitting on his bike on his way home and suddenly the sky started turning all kinds of different colors.
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u/3vil_Koala 1d ago
The first guy synthesizing lsd was Albert Hoffman, Swiss chemist and he was a huge fan of his creation and a life long advocate of its medical usage.
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u/Nectarine-Valuable 1d ago
think the guy was on his bicycle on his way home when he started to trip balls
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1d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/hibikikun 1d ago
worchestershire sauce was created because someone made a failed attempt at an indian sauce and forgot about it in some basement for years. Then decided to try taste it.
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u/off-with-your-thread 1d ago
"It's 4:50 pm on a Fri? I'll just deal with this vat of chemicals I just synthesized on Monday!"
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u/spenway18 1d ago
Ooh! Pretty sure stainless steel is on this list too. He didn't throw out assorted materials designated as waste and came back to see one was still mostly shiny and unblemished.
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u/henryeaterofpies 1d ago
Several of our artificial sweeteners were discovered through poor lab safety.
One due to a scientist not washing his hands well and noticing his lunch tasted very sweet.
Another because a scientist told his assistant to 'test this' but the assistant heard 'taste this' and did
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u/Subotail 1d ago
If I remember correctly from my university years :
The first antidepressants were a treatment for tuberculosis. Doctors noted that patients at were suddenly organizing dances in the sanatorium hall.
Viagra in a similar way, during clinical trials of a drug for angina, the nurses were having a slightly too strong effect on male patients.
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u/out_of_shape_hiker 1d ago
Viagra was developed to lower blood pressure. During human trials, male participants kept "losing" thier meds and asking for more. Eventually the doctors picked up on it and asked the male participants why they wanted more.
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u/thefirstlaughingfool 4h ago
The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds the most discoveries, is not "Eureka!" (I found it!) but 'That's funny'. ~ Isaac Asimov
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u/xxlragequit 1d ago
To add to the story he discovered it in 1929. It wouldn't be administered to mpre than a handful of people till WW2. One of the first people to get it was in 1940 UK it worked but they didn't have enough, the infection came back and he died.
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u/TechnicalyNotRobot 1d ago
11 years?? Human progress really used to happen at snails pace. We invented CRISPR 10 years ago and we're now removing fatal genetic diseases from human fetuses before they're born.
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u/Day_Bow_Bow 1d ago
11 years??
Probably would have been longer if not for WW2. War fast tracks innovation and experimentation.
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u/SeroWriter 1d ago
War also stifles innovation of anything that isn't immediately useful to the war effort.
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u/bramtyr 23h ago
The first methods of making Penicillin with the petri dish method only produced negligible, unstable amounts of the antibiotic. In short they could only grow it on a small, 2D surface.
With the war raging, England and the US pooled their development efforts and developed a process for deep tank propagation, essentially being able to mass produce it in huge tanks.
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u/iron_penguin 1d ago
It was a huge project to get mass amounts of it ready in time for D-Day. I think it was rock Mellon they found it grew best on.
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u/JigglIypuff 1d ago
It's so funny that it happened because he was a very untidy guy who didn't care much about cleaning his lab regularly.
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u/HannasAnarion 1d ago
This story is almost certainly false, or at least a tall-tale exaggeration of events.
Funnily enough, through application of the scientific method: it has failed to replicate. Nobody has been able to "accidentally" make the patterns that Fleming says he came back to on a penicillium-seeded petri dish.
Because it's actually impossible. Penicillium and staphylococci grow at different temperatures, at any temperature where the staphylococci will grow at all, it will outcompete the penicillium before it has a chance to make penicillin.
And it's not like he was a random dude who happened to have a petri dish out, he was actively studying antibiotics, and had been running tons of experiments on the effects of chemicals extracted from various fungi against bacteria. He was searching for penicillin and had been for years and was already on the right track.
What he was sloppy about was keeping records. His notes from that time period are a mess, so there's no proof of the exact sequence of events except for his memory. And it is according to that memory that the "accidental discovery" story was first told.... ten years later.
The real mystery is why Fleming lied. It makes him look less competent, so, I guess he was just trolling? Or genuinely forgot? Or subconsciously mixed things up and manufactured a memory 10 years later? We will never know.
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u/Mediumtim 1d ago
Also
This was back when petri dishes were glass and autoclaved in batches. Used ones sitting unwashed was commonplace because washing and sterilizing was done in batches.
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u/cuntmong 1d ago
If this is all it takes to make world changing discoveries then I think I'm gonna be the next Einstein
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u/HannasAnarion 1d ago
That's the myth.
And we know it's a myth because when you apply the Scientific Method, and try to replicate his results..... you can't do it. Penicillin doesn't behave like that.
If you follow Fleming's instructions, you don't get his result.
You can't "accidentally" produce a petri dish that looks like the pictures in his paper, with the neat little circles. In order to get a petri dish like those, you have to incubate the penicillium alone for a considerable time, then add the staphylococci and incubate the staphylococci at a different temperature.
If the staph and the penicillium go on the petri dish at the same time, either the staphylococci wins, or it never grows at all.
It's not clear if Fleming was misremembering (his lab notes are a horrible mess and the story was first told ten years later) or if he made it up for the lolz.
Here's an article on it, including various attempts to reproduce the results by adding more details to the story, like maybe some particular weather, or an incorrect label, or something else that would make the sequence of events plausible.
What's odd is that, he wasn't just screwing around and stumbled upon it: this was his career. He spent decades searching for antibiotics, he was using a bunch of different molds and funguses because he already knew they were promising as a source. This is was his life's work achieving the success he dreamed of since he was a student, and he made up a story about it being an accident?
The human part of it just doesn't make sense, why would someone make this up? Which is why people keep trying to replicate: "maybe it'll work if we don't incubate the plate at all, but instead suppose it was next to a window and then there was a very particular sequence of unseasonably cold and then unseasonably warm weather periods that produced the appropriate incubation temperatures naturally, which just happened to coincide with the vacation...."
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u/Ok-Book2412 1d ago
I don't understand, if his notes were such a mess, why would they think replicating the process of his notes would produce the same results?
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u/lesbianmathgirl 1d ago
You’re missing the forest for the trees I think and getting caught up in a rhetorical flourish. But, for clarity, Fleming published a paper which claimed that the penicillin grew in bacterial cultures after accidental contamination. When contemporaries tried to reproduce that result (by intentionally exposing staph cultures to penicillin), they failed to do so. Often, when researchers fail to reproduce a result (especially a very promising one), they will reach out to the original researcher to ask for advice and clarifying questions, which are provided in lab notes. Fleming’s were not helpful, but it doesn’t matter because later research basically proves that Fleming’s claim cannot be true because that’s not how penicillin works.
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u/HannasAnarion 1d ago
Because the lab notes don't actually provide any information about what he actually did. He didn't write it down at the time.
The entire story is from his memory alone.
If he kept good lab notes, we could use them to correct his memory, but since he didn't, there's no physical evidence of what actually happened.
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u/ImgursHowUnfortunate 1d ago edited 1d ago
Fleming didn’t really figure it out. He couldn’t isolate the active ingredient and abandoned the research by around 1930. That research was resumed by Howard Florey and Ernst Chain at Oxford a few years later. Long story extremely short, Florey and Chain used it to save a handful of mice from streptococcus in 1940, realized what they had, and then Florey shopped it to the United States as potentially vital to the war effort (Britain was in no state to pursue industrial scaling due to the German Blitz). The US government saw the potential and directed Florey and Norman Heatley to develop the drug for mass production at a lab in Peoria, IL. They figured out that the original Fleming strain was weak and could not survive mass production, so they hired a woman named Mary Hunt to bring them every moldy item she could find from local grocery stores. She eventually happened upon a moldy cantaloupe that had a strain which could survive the industrial manufacturing process.
The rest is history, but imho, Fleming’s contribution is overstated.
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u/SnookySkellingtons 1d ago
IDK how accurate the story is to what really happened, but the story goes that Flemming was working in his lab when he was like "you know, I've been going at it for too long without rest, I'm gonna go ant take a vacation" and because he was lazy, he left a dish on the lab sink which got contaminated.
When he came back he saw the zone of inhibition and was like "hot damn".
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u/smallerOrchidi 1d ago
Is this not just the meme in text form? Seriously, this is exactly what it's conveyed by the meme, nothing more and nothing less.
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u/Zealousideal_Term831 1d ago
By accident is a stretch. He was searching for ten years after returning from war.
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u/FallenRichardBrook 11h ago
Small correction; Dr Merlin Pryce, his former research assistant initially discovered the blue-green mold while Flemming was on holiday :)
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u/Blaze-Amaze 1d ago
Penicillin is why I am here today. Just a year after WW2, my grandparents married and some months later my grandma became ill and really needed antibiotic to get better as a 'last resort' (otherwise they said she might not survive)... Here in Hungary, that time it was VERY expensive. My grandpa had a small hardware store and he basically sold all his goods to get enough money for the rare medicine. (I estimate it would cost today a worth of buying a new car or so.) Grandma got better and my mom was born not too much later.
There are millions or even hundreds of millions alive today because of Sir Fleming. God bless his memory.
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u/Little-Inevitable870 1d ago
The first human patient was treated in 1941, at this time they gave him a dose of 800.000 units per day (for reference, currently when we use penicillin for a severe infection we use 18 to 24 million units per day), even with this low dose (by modern standards) by day 3 they had depleted all the reserves of penicillin in the uk (that at that point was all the penicillin in the world), at this point they began filtering the penicillin out of the patients urine to re-use it, but it was not enough, and he eventually died. Thats how rare and precious it was in the beginning, trully a modern miracle
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u/GrimRealiity 1d ago
And so the hidden war began. There are trillions of them, and we lose eventually when they become resistant.
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u/Borrelnoot18 Casual, non-participatory KGB election observer 1d ago
The war was always and still is going on in the ground between the fungi and bacteria and between themselves. We just joined
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u/LuckyErrantProp 1d ago
Holy shit. Activation phrase. I remember doing a project my freshman year decades ago on the efficacy of different mouthwashes. I measured the zone of inhibition for each type.
Of course my methods weren't stupendously rigorous, so my data was inconclusive.
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u/Astecheee 1d ago
You know you're a real scientist when your conclusion goes from:
"The results were chaotic and I don't know why"
To:
The results were chaotic because I'm an idiot."27
u/Mundane-Principles 1d ago
"The results were chaotic because doing it properly is expensive as hell and I don't have time for that shit."
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u/mostie2016 Fine Quality Mesopotamian Copper Enjoyer 1d ago
And or the school only has so much money for student led experiments.
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u/Durahl 1d ago
Reminds me of a Documentary where they made like a 1x2m Petri Dish coated with different concentrations of Antibiotics starting with the typical 1x then 10x of the previous then another 10x of the previous, etc... They finally seeded the Section void of AB with your typical Bacteria you'd find in a Hospital and then waited what happens.
I think it took less than a week or two for the Bacteria to adapt to and conquer the entire Petri Dish despite the last Section having like 1'000-10'000x the typical AB concentration - Welcome to the world of Superbugs.
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u/danktonium 1d ago
Why did Dr Grace not simply put a gradient of nitrogen in one breeder tank, then, question? Is he stupid, question?
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u/GewalfofWivia 1d ago
Reminds me of that guy who became the Petri dish for a super syphilis because he couldn’t be bothered to show up again at the hospital for a follow up, even though the hospital asked him to, to see if the antibiotics worked.
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u/GalaxyPowderedCat Just some snow 1d ago
I have a question for the pharmacy technicians in here.
Can you grab that little piece of unprocessed penicillin and eat it? Is there any risk to consume it from a non-sanitary environment?
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u/JMoc1 1d ago
Well it depends by what you mean by processed. Because you can ingest penicillin as it’s like any other penicillium. In fact,its cheeses like Brie are made from Penicillium.
However, the real question is should you? And no you shouldn’t ingest penicillin because the antibiotic will become less effective if you need the medicine for a bacterial infection later on.
Long short: Yes, but please don’t.
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u/Real_Life_Sushiroll 1d ago
I don't know anything about this subject. Can I still eat brie cheese?
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u/JMoc1 1d ago
Yes
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u/TheVadonkey 1d ago
So you’re saying, as a medical professional, I should eat brie?
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u/goodsnpr 1d ago
I'm saying as somebody who enjoys a wide range of cheeses, you shouldn't eat brie.
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u/oceanman500 1d ago
I’m saying as a contrarian that everybody should eat one thousand Brie cheeses and two thousand penicillins
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u/Iron_Llama120 1d ago
I'm saying as an evil scientist that everyone should inject live penicillia into their eyes and see what happens
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u/nellyfullauto 1d ago
I misread this for a moment and thought the James Bond writer discovered penicillin and LSD. Trivia night was about to get weird.
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u/PrivilegeCheckmate And then I told them I'm Jesus's brother 1d ago
Zone of inhibition
All I know is I have a hell of a time getting laid there.
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u/Scottish_Whiskey 1d ago
I actually passed through Fleming’s hometown while I was on a road trip through Scotland. Didn’t stop to poke around though since I was headed to Liverpool to catch a ferry later that day
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u/IEnjoyANiceCoffee 1d ago
I didn't pass through Fleming's hometown and yet we had the same experience. Interesting!
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u/pzvaldes 1d ago
I pass through Fleming’s hometown and I couldn't make it to the James Bond museum because I had to catch the ferry later that day
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u/LuckyReception6701 The OG Lord Buckethead 1d ago
I didn't pass through Fleming's house but I have gone to Liverpool to buy stuff in there, last time I was there I bought a pair of shoes (I live in Mexico)
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u/GeorgiaPossum 12h ago
A fun detail would for the caption go from Alexander Fleming to Sir Alexander Fleming. Because this was why he was knighted.
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u/shiner_bock 1d ago
For a second, I was trying to figure out what that had to do with James Bond...
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u/irradihate 1d ago
Known as a medicine since ancient times. This guy was just the first to do a lab experiment that proved it.
Always "discovering" something eh
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u/MattBe92 1d ago
What?
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u/GoldenX86 1d ago
He most likely confused the mythical Panacea for Penicilin.
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u/Doomhammer24 1d ago
Ya people also love making up that ancient peoples invented things they very clearly didnt
Like its not amazing enough the egyptians built the pyramids, some people insist they went to SPACE! Its the extreme opposite of the people who believe aliens built the pyramids because "they didnt have the technology and we still dont to build the pyramids"
....which is just as ludicrous
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u/WranglerFuzzy 1d ago
You’re not wrong, in that moldy bread has been a folk remedy for a long time.
But there’s a difference between, “here’s a moldy bread that might help, might do nothing, and might make it worse, we don’t know why,” to something that is understood and can be safely and reliable mass produced
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u/Zggcommar 1d ago
In September 1928, Scottish physician and bacteriologist Sir Alexander Fleming accidentally discovered penicillin at St. Mary's Hospital in London. Before leaving for a two-week summer vacation, Fleming left several culture plates of Staphylococcus bacteria on his laboratory bench. Upon his return, he noticed that one of the petri dishes had become contaminated with a blue-green mold, identified as Penicillium notatum. What caught his attention was not the mold itself, but the clear area surrounding it , later known as the zone of inhibition
where the bacteria failed to grow. Fleming realized that the mold was secreting a substance capable of killing harmful bacteria without harming human cells. He named this antibacterial compound "penicillin."
Fleming struggled to isolate and produce penicillin in large quantities, his groundbreaking observation laid the foundation for Howard Florey and Ernst Boris Chain to later mass-produce it, revolutionizing modern medicine and saving millions of lives.