TIME Magazine called me a short, gentle, retiring Scot with somewhat dreamy blue eyes, fierce white hair and a mind with the thrust of a cobra, you could say they broke the mould when i discovered Penicillin (see what i did there) which was all down to me being a bit of a slob.While serving in the Royal Army Medical Corps as a bacteriologist studying wound infections, i discovered that the antiseptics the Army was using to treat wounds were doing more harm than good and more soldiers were dying from antiseptic treatment than from the infections so i set up some experiments to see what would kill the bacteria.
I messed around a bit with a few experiments but i was getting nowhere so i left my London lab for a two-week holiday to Scotland without bothering to clean up first.
When i returned, i found the stack of dirty dishes i'd left in the sink and petri dishes smeared with mould and upon closer inspection i noticed an unusual mould growing on one of the dishes which had inhibited the growth of bacteria and wrote a paper about it but didn't think it could actually be used to help anyone, so i ignored it and moved on, firstly cleaning up my work bench not realising that what i had discovered was penicillin.
Meanwhile, over the next decade a few other scientists read my report and started working on isolating the active component of the mould that i had described and reproduced the antibiotic properties of penicillin as well as figuring out a way to mass produce it.
It felt a bit of a cheek to accept the Nobel Prize alongside the scientists who actually did all the work when my true role was literally forgetting to clean up before i went on holiday but i accepted it anyway.
I may have accidentally saved countless lives, spawned a massive pharmaceutical industry, and earned myself a knighthood and the Nobel Prize but most importantly i gave messy people everywhere a reason to take pride in their untidiness and the reason for Mrs. Fleming to hire a cleaner.
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