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60 free Alexander Fleming trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Alexander Fleming trivia quiz covers the Scottish farm boy whose untidy laboratory produced the first antibiotic. The easy questions handle penicillin, the mould, the shared Nobel Prize, the famous 'That's funny' and the cathedral where his ashes lie. From there it moves through the life: the Ayrshire farm, the shipping office, the rifle club that got him into research, the wartime hospital in Boulogne and the 1917 paper that said antiseptics were killing soldiers. The harder end covers lysozyme and the tears bought for threepence, the bacterium he named, the species the mould turned out to be, the talk on Pfeiffer's bacillus that nobody noticed, Chain's 'I thought he was dead', the first patients cured, the spinal injection of 1942, his fury at an American patent, his warnings about resistance and the Churchill story that never happened. Every answer was checked against Fleming's encyclopaedia entry before publishing and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. Our medicine and famous scientists quizzes are the natural next stop.
30 of 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Fleming shared the 1945 Nobel Prize with Howard Florey and which biochemist?
Ernst Chain
The Oxford pair turned his laboratory curiosity into a usable drug; Fleming always praised them for it.
Q 02Fleming's penicillin came from a mould of which genus?
Penicillium
He first thought it was P. chrysogenum; in 2011 the strain was finally identified as P. rubens.
Q 03Fleming discovered the enzyme lysozyme in 1922 in what?
His own nasal mucus
A drop of it cleared a plate of bacteria; his notebook records 'Staphyloid coccus from A.F.'s nose'.
Q 04The bacterium Fleming named Micrococcus lysodeikticus was reassigned in 1972 to which species name?
Luteus
The 'Fleming strain' of it is still a model organism in biology.
Q 05In which year was Fleming knighted?
1944
By D-Day that year there was enough penicillin to treat every wounded Allied soldier.
Q 06A 2009 STV poll voted Fleming the third greatest Scot, behind Robert Burns and whom?
William Wallace
Time had already put him among the 100 most important people of the twentieth century.
Q 07Fleming was born on Lochfield farm near Darvel, in which Scottish county?
Ayrshire
He was the third of four children of a farmer's second marriage; his father died when he was seven.
Q 08How old was Fleming when his father died?
Seven
Hugh Fleming had been 59 when he married Alexander's mother.
Q 09Before studying medicine, Fleming spent four years working where?
A shipping office
An inheritance from an uncle and a physician brother's advice sent him to medical school at twenty.
Q 10Fleming enrolled in 1901 at which London medical school, where he later discovered penicillin?
St Mary's
The laboratory in Paddington is preserved as a museum.
Q 11Fleming joined the research department because a captain wanted to keep him in which sport?
Rifle shooting
He had been a private in the London Scottish Regiment and was a fine shot.
Q 12Fleming became assistant bacteriologist to which pioneer of vaccine therapy?
Almroth Wright
Wright predicted antibiotic resistance before anyone had seen it in the lab.
Q 13Fleming's 1908 BSc, taken with a gold medal, was in which subject?
Bacteriology
He lectured at St Mary's until the war and returned as professor of bacteriology in 1928.
Q 21What did Fleming famously remark on seeing the contaminated staphylococcus plate in September 1928?
'That's funny'
He had left the plates on a corner bench before his family holiday.
Q 22How did the 1936 International Congress of Microbiology react to Fleming's talk on penicillin?
Nobody believed him
It was the second time he had been met with silence; he bore it stoically and kept working on the drug.
Q 23The contaminating mould was traced in 1966 to the room of which colleague, directly below Fleming's lab?
Charles La Touche
La Touche was the mycologist who first (mis)identified the mould as P. rubrum.
Q 14During WWI, Fleming's department moved almost wholesale to a military hospital in which French port?
Boulogne
There he watched soldiers die of sepsis despite, and sometimes because of, antiseptics.
Q 15Fleming's 1917 Lancet article argued that which treatment was killing more soldiers than infection?
Antiseptics
Deep wounds sheltered bacteria while the chemicals destroyed the body's own defences; most army doctors ignored him.
Q 16Fleming's ingenious 1917 wound experiment depended on which of his practical skills?
Glassblowing
He built glass models of jagged wounds to show where antiseptics could not reach.
Q 17V. D. Allison said Fleming would never have made his two great discoveries had he been what?
Tidier
Fleming teased Allison for his 'excessive tidiness'; contaminated plates were exactly what he expected to find.
Q 18To collect tears for the lysozyme experiments, Fleming's lab used what, after onions failed?
Lemons
For five or six weeks the staff's tears were the only supply.
Q 19How much were laboratory attendants paid for each contribution of tears?
Threepence
The enzyme turned up in sputum, cartilage, blood, pus and egg white too.
Q 20The 'patient suffering from acute coryza' in Fleming's 1922 lysozyme paper was later identified as whom?
The author himself
Coryza is the common cold; the enzyme came out of his own runny nose.
Q 24In 2011 Fleming's mould was finally identified as which species?
P. rubens
It had been called notatum and chrysogenum in the intervening decades.
Q 25Before settling on the name penicillin in March 1929, Fleming called the substance 'mould juice' or what?
'The inhibitor'
It knocked out staphylococci and the germs of scarlet fever, pneumonia and diphtheria.
Q 26Fleming found penicillin useless against which disease, the one he was actually hunting a cure for?
Typhoid fever
It failed against Gram-negative bacteria, with the odd exception of the gonorrhoea germ.
Q 27Fleming's 1929 talk announcing penicillin was titled 'A medium for the isolation of' whose bacillus?
Pfeiffer's
The chairman, Henry Dale, later admitted he had sensed nothing of importance in it.
Q 28Fleming published the penicillin discovery in 1929 in which periodical?
British Journal of Experimental Pathology
It attracted little attention, and the drug 'languished largely forgotten in the 1930s'.
Q 29Told in 1940 that Fleming was visiting, an Oxford biochemist said 'Good God! I thought he was' what?
Dead
The Oxford team had just published its first results on purifying the drug.
Q 30Who was first to propose the correct molecular structure of penicillin?
Edward Abraham
He worked alongside Chain at Oxford's Dunn School of Pathology.