Alexander Fleming FORGOT to Clean His Lab and Saved Millions

His messy lab and a dish he forgot to clean became the discovery that saved hundreds of millions.

Alexander Fleming was a brilliant but famously untidy scientist in a cluttered London laboratory.

Back then a simple infection could kill, and doctors had almost nothing to fight it.

In 1928 he left for holiday without cleaning his dishes of bacteria.

He returned to find a stray mold had drifted in and killed the bacteria around it.

Most people would have washed it away. Fleming stopped and asked what the mold was doing.

He had found penicillin, but could not purify it, and the world ignored it for years.

Years later two other scientists turned his mold into a medicine, just in time for war.

Penicillin saved countless wounded soldiers and began the age of antibiotics.

One forgotten dish had ended the era when a scratch could kill.

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