Alexander Fleming was born in 1881 in Scotland. He went to a small school in village, and when he left school he didn’t go to university. He worked for five years in an office. But his brother, Tom, was a doctor and helped Fleming to go to university and study medicine. So he went to London University and 1906 he became a doctor. In 1915, Fleming married Sarah McElroy, an lrish woman. They had one son.
Fleming worked as a doctor in the Fist World War (1914-18). During the war, many soldiers died in hospital because they didn’t have the right medicines. So after the war, Fleming tried to find a drug that could help them. He worked for many years and in 1928 he discovered a new drug. It was the first antibiotic and he called it ‘penicillin’ He later worked with an Australian and a German scientist to develop a drug that doctors could use. In 1945, they won the Nobel Prize in medicine for their work on penicillin.