Penicillin Coloring Page

In 1928 a Scottish scientist named Alexander Fleming came back from holiday to his laboratory in London and found something odd. A fuzzy mold had landed on one of his dishes of bacteria, and the bacteria around it had died. The mold was called Penicillium, and the germ-killer it made was called penicillin.

It took more than 10 years for other scientists to find a way to make enough penicillin to use as a medicine. By the 1940s it was saving the lives of wounded soldiers and people with serious infections. It was the first antibiotic, and it made once-dangerous illnesses much easier to treat.