1928, while Alexander Fleming was away on a holiday from his job as a medical researcher at St. Mary’s Hospital in London, some spores of mold from the genus Penicillium drifted into his lab and landed on a petri dish that he had left unattended. Thanks to a sequence of chance events—that Fleming hadn’t cleaned up his petri dishes before departing on holiday, that the weather was unusually cool that summer (and thus good for spores), that Fleming remained away long enough for the slow-growing mold to act—he returned to find that the bacterial growth in the petri dish had been conspicuously
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