Alexander Fleming

Alexander Fleming was a Scottish physician and microbiologist who spent years studying bacteria when, in 1922, he discovered the enzyme lysozyme in his own nasal discharge, along with a bacterium he named Micrococcus lysodeikticus. Six years later, in 1928, he noticed that mould from the genus Penicillium rubens had contaminated a culture plate and killed the surrounding bacteria — what he'd stumbled onto was benzylpenicillin, later called penicillin G, a substance that would be described as "the single greatest victory ever achieved over disease". He shared the 1945 Nobel Prize in Physiology…