Alexander Fleming

Alexander Fleming was born on a farm in Ayrshire, Scotland. He moved to London at fourteen and worked as a shipping clerk until a legacy from an uncle allowed him to study medicine at St. Mary's Hospital, where he stayed for the rest of his career. During the First World War he served in battlefield hospitals in France and saw many soldiers die from infected wounds, and he showed that the antiseptics then used often did more harm than good in deep wounds. In September 1928, returning from holiday, he noticed that a mold had grown on one of his dishes of staphylococcus bacteria and that the bacteria around it had died. He identified the mold as Penicillium and named the bacteria-killing substance penicillin. He could not purify it in large amounts, and for years little came of it. In 1940 Howard Florey and Ernst Chain at Oxford developed it into a drug, and it was mass-produced during the Second World War, saving countless lives. The three shared the Nobel Prize in 1945. Fleming died in 1955.

Faith: Came from a Presbyterian background; he was said not to be particularly religious. Source: Wikipedia