Alexander Fleming

Alexander Fleming sits at his crowded bench at St Mary's Hospital in London during the Second World War, bent over a culture in his hands, with racks of tubes, stacked dishes and a microscope lamp around him. The official wartime caption notes that he was still experimenting fourteen years after his discovery of penicillin, which places the picture around 1942, just as the drug was being scaled up for wartime production. Look for the round culture dishes stacked along the bench: the same kind of dish in which he first noticed the mold killing bacteria.