Many of our life-saving medications depend on the discovery of strange medical solutions. Antibiotics were one of the greatest finds and have added 10 years of life on to the average person who would otherwise die from some sort of bacterial infection. In 1928, when research scientist Alexander Fleming discovered the bacteria in a stack of dirty Petri dishes, one of them caught his attention. “That’s funny,” Fleming was reported as saying when he found a surviving mold on a dish, which he later identified as Penicillium notatum.
His discovery laid the ground for a revolutionary medical approach to drug treatment. Since then, researchers have been searching for a potent antibacterial solution to prevent the drug-resistant infections of two million people in America, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Every year, at least 23,000 of those people die as a result,…
