Penicillin had been discovered sixteen years earlier by a British scientist, Alexander Fleming. Keeping a messy laboratory, Fleming had returned to find his experiments overgrown with a fungus which had destroyed bacteria; using the fungus and the tears and snot of his assistants, he developed penicillin, the first natural antibiotic. ‘One sometimes finds what one isn’t looking for,’ he said, yet it was not really an accident as he was an enthusiastic innovator: ‘I play with microbes.’
