September 28th is about the time when summer is definitively over in London. Even for universities.
Alexander, working in London in 1928, returned from vacation on September 28th. He hadn't cleaned up his food before he went away from his laboratory and so was greeted with a none-too-pleasant sight.
Yet that sight changed the lives of us all, interpreted by his medical-scientific imagination. The mould was overpowering the bacterial culture and, at last, bacterial infection might be defeated. In the words of Alexander Fleming himself, "When
I woke up just after dawn on September 28, 1928, I certainly didn't plan to
revolutionise all medicine by discovering the world's first antibiotic. . . but I suppose that was
exactly what I did.”
While we plan the enjoyment of holidays they are not necessarily the places where the truely wondrous things happen. They can happen anywhere and any day.
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