Word: mold
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...noticed that the mold had cleared a wide, bacteria-free area between itself and the staphylococci-perhaps had killed them. He did not destroy the moldy culture...
...which includes Galileo watching the swing of a lamp in the Cathedral of Pisa and deducing from it the law of the pendulum, and Isaac Newton watching the fall of an apple and deducing from it the law of gravity. For thousands of years men looked at the cryptogamic mold called Penicillium notatum, but Dr. Fleming was the first to see its cryptic meaning. His discernment, restoring to science the creative vision which it has sometimes been held to lack, also restored health to millions of men living and unborn...
...story of his discovery is legendary. Back in 1928 Alexander Fleming, M.B., B.S., F.R.C.S.,* taught bacteriology at St. Mary's Hospital Medical School, University of London. In his small, old-fashioned laboratory, he grew staphylococci in petri plates (flat glass culture dishes). One day he found that mold had spoiled one of his cultures. Staphylococcus grew on only half of the plate. A blue-green mold spotted, but did not cover, the other half...
...Nostradamus' secret book, comprehends in a flash the sign of the macrocosm, and is able at last to conjure up the Earth Spirit. But that was not the way Dr. Fleming reported his epochal perception. Said he: "I was sufficiently interested in the antibacterial substance produced by the mold to pursue the subject...
...Scientific Method. Dr. Fleming stuck a loop of platinum wire into the mold colony, dipped the wire into some mold-growing liquid in a test tube. In less than a week, there was a felt-like growth at the mouth of the tube and a half-inch of cloudy liquid below it. To Dr. Fleming's amazement, the liquid in which the culture grew, even when diluted 800 times, prevented staphylococci from growing at all: "It was therefore some two or three times as strong in that respect as pure carbolic acid...