Sir Alexander Fleming, a Scottish researcher, is credited with the discovery of penicillin in 1928.
Antibiotic production is a major industrial application of microbes. Penicillin (the first antibiotic discovered) was discovered by Alexander Fleming in 1928 while working on Staphylococcus bacteria, that he observed growing in one of his unwashed Petri cultures. However, its full potential as an effective antibiotic was established much later by Ernest Chain and Howard Florey who got the noble prize in 1945 for this discovery.