No. 1 - Penicillin You read this far into the list looking for penicillin, didn't you? That's OK. As one of the most famous and fortunate accidents of the 20th century, penicillin belongs at No. 1 on this list.
If you've been living under a rock for the past 80 years or so, here's how the popular story goes:
Alexander Fleming didn't clean up his workstation before going on vacation one day in 1928. When he came back, Fleming noticed that there was a strange fungus on some of his cultures. Even stranger was that bacteria didn't seem to thrive near those cultures.
Penicillin became the first and is still one of the most widely used antibiotics.
Want to know more about antibiotics? Our friends at How Stuff Works explain it all for you.
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