penicillin who discovered

Penicillin was discovered by the Scottish physician and microbiologist Alexander Fleming in 1928. While working at St. Mary's Hospital in London, Fleming noticed that a mold called Penicillium notatum was secreting a substance that killed bacteria, which he named penicillin. This discovery was accidental but became one of the most important advances in medicine, leading to the development of antibiotics that could treat bacterial infections effectively. Later, a team at the University of Oxford including Howard Florey and Ernst Chain developed methods to cultivate, purify, and mass-produce penicillin for widespread use, especially during World War II. Fleming, Florey, and Chain shared the 1945 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for this breakthrough.