Maren McKenna

Wait, you're listening?

Okay.

So the way the story goes, it starts in 1928.

1928, Alexander Fleming, the story goes, who knows if it's apocryphal or not, is growing staph, Staphylococcus, in his lab.

That's Maren McKenna.

She's a science writer.

And staph is a bacterium.

It lives on our skin, and it especially likes parts of the body that are warm and damp.

So it likes to be just up our noses or in our genitals or in our armpits, places like that.

And generally, it's no big deal.

Doesn't really do us any harm.

But if it gets into a scratch or a cut and makes its way inside our bodies, staph goes from being this benign companion to being potentially deadly.

Anyway, London, 1928.

Fleming is growing staff in his lab.

In these little petri dishes.

And he was a slob, basically.

And he goes on a vacation, leaves his petri dishes, covered in bacteria, just around, leaves his window open.

And something blows across his lab plates.

Some tiny little speck of a thing just floats in through the window and comes to a rest on one of those Petri dishes.

And so a few weeks later.