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Person

Charles La Touche

A man with gray hair and a mustache wearing a light-colored coat over a white shirt and blue bow tie stands in a softly lit room with shelves in the background.

Irish mycologist working at St Mary's Hospital in the 1920s, in a laboratory directly below Fleming's. La Touche was culturing fungal samples from the homes of asthma sufferers for the allergist John Freeman. He later identified the strain on Fleming's contaminated plate as Penicillium, though it was subsequently re-classified. The hypothesis that the spore drifted up the stairwell from his lab is the most widely accepted account of penicillin's origin.

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