Do we like Alexander Fleming?
Our score: 8 out of 10. No harmful words or acts turned up and his resistance warning was ahead of its time, but the credit row over penicillin keeps it short of a 9.
Alexander Fleming was a Scottish bacteriologist who noticed that Penicillium mould had antibacterial properties and used it to treat several cases of eye infection. He named penicillin in 1929, and he also discovered lysozyme, an antimicrobial enzyme found in tears, saliva and mucus. He died in March 1955.
Here's the stoush. Historians say his part in turning penicillin into a medicine has been greatly overblown, because he could not isolate it or make a useful antibiotic from it. The isolating and mass-producing was done by Howard Florey, Ernst Chain and their colleague Norman Heatley at Oxford, and Fleming had no role in that.
Fleming himself coined “the Fleming myth” for the press's habit of crediting him alone, and Florey was generous enough to credit Fleming's 1928 discovery in 1945. Even so, one account says Florey later grew exasperated at Fleming's inclination to claim more credit for mass production than he was due. Fleming's own line in 1952 was that nobody could have invented penicillin: “I only discovered it.” That's the asterisk, and it's a small one.
On the harm test, the record is thin and clean. Nothing turned up from him about LGBTQ+ people, women, migrants or people of colour, and he died in 1955, so there is no modern grievance or conspiracy slide to find. What he did say publicly was a warning: in his Nobel lecture he said “It is not difficult to make microbes resistant to penicillin in the laboratory”.
Nothing new on him lately. The 2026 search results were anniversary-style pages and reposts, with no fresh dispute or revelation about the man himself.
The good stuff is big. His observation led to the first antibiotic, and he shared the 1945 Nobel Prize with Florey and Chain. He also warned that penicillin might one day be sold over the counter and that someone ignorant could underdose and breed resistant microbes, which is now a global health worry. Heatley missing out on the prize came down to the three-recipient limit, not to anything Fleming is reported to have done.