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Person

Alexander Fleming

A man with gray hair and a mustache, dressed in a light-colored suit with a dark vest and tie, sits against a dark background.

Scottish bacteriologist, born 1881 in rural Ayrshire, who spent most of his career at St Mary's Hospital, London. Decorated as a medical officer in the First World War, he was preoccupied with the problem of wound infection. Famously untidy in the laboratory, he made two major discoveries — lysozyme in 1922 and penicillin in 1928 — both from contamination events that a tidier worker might have discarded. He shared the 1945 Nobel Prize.

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