The story of antibiotics starts with a healthy dose of serendipity. A young man named Alexander Fleming was earning a wage through a boring job in shipping when his uncle died, leaving him enough money to quit and to enroll in 1903 at St. Mary’s Hospital Medical School in London instead. There he became a valued member of the rifle club. The captain of the shooting team didn’t want to lose Fleming when his studies were over, so he lined up a job for him. That’s how Fleming became a bacteriologist.9
