Scottish researcher Alexander Fleming didn’t need to develop a strategy to discover penicillin. In the summer of 1928, before embarking on a 2-week holiday, he accidentally left a petri dish smeared with staphylococcus bacteria uncovered on his lab bench. While he vacationed at his family’s country home in Suffolk, England, a warm spell settled on Oxford, and the flourishing bacteria covered the dish’s gel in a thick lawn.
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