Alexander Fleming Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
6correct to beat the crowd
59 free Alexander Fleming trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Sep 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 59 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Fleming shared the 1945 Nobel Prize with Howard Florey and which biochemist?
Ernst Chain
Ernst Chain: the Berlin-trained chemist left for England in 1933 when the Nazis took power, and at Oxford he and Florey purified the drug that Fleming had been unable to stabilise.
Q 02Fleming's penicillin belongs to which family of medicines?
Antibiotics
Antibiotics: penicillin kills bacteria but has no effect on viruses, which is why a doctor won't prescribe it for a cold.
Q 03Fleming first found the enzyme lysozyme at work in a sample of what?
His own nasal mucus
His own nasal mucus: he had a cold, and germs dissolved around the blob he put on a culture plate, yet the enzyme proved too weak against the bacteria that make people seriously ill.
Q 04Which group put up the monument to Fleming unveiled in 1964, in thanks for penicillin?
Bullfighters
Bullfighters: infected wounds had killed so many matadors that their benevolent society raised the money, and its bronze matador now doffs his hat to Fleming's bust outside Madrid's Las Ventas bullring.
Q 05Which British monarch knighted Fleming?
George VI
George VI: the wartime king knighted Fleming in 1944 and gave the same honour that year to Howard Florey, the Oxford professor whose team had turned the mould into a usable drug.
Q 06A 2009 STV poll voted Fleming the third greatest Scot, behind Robert Burns and whom?
William Wallace
William Wallace took second, so the top three were a poet, a medieval warrior and a bacteriologist, with Fleming finishing ahead of Robert the Bruce.
Q 07Fleming was born on Lochfield farm near Darvel, in which county that was also the birthplace of Robert Burns?
Ayrshire
Ayrshire: he went to the village school in Darvel and then to Kilmarnock Academy, before leaving the hills as a teenager to join a brother in London.
Q 08Whose death hit the Fleming family farm when Alexander was seven?
Father
Father: he died, leaving a widow and eight children from two marriages; Alexander was the second youngest of them.
Q 09Before studying medicine, Fleming spent four years working where?
A shipping office
A shipping office kept him as a junior clerk for four years, until a legacy from an uncle let him walk out and start medical school.
Q 10Fleming is said to have chosen St Mary's medical school because he had once played against it at which sport?
Water polo
Water polo: he is said to have picked St Mary's over the other London schools within reach simply because he had once played a match against its team.
Q 11Fleming joined the research department because a captain wanted to keep him in which sport?
Rifle shooting
Rifle shooting: the hospital club's captain wanted to keep a crack shot on the team, so he talked Fleming into a laboratory post, and Fleming stayed in that department for the rest of his career.
Q 12Fleming became assistant bacteriologist to which pioneer of vaccine therapy?
Almroth Wright
Almroth Wright was famous enough to be the model for the hero of Bernard Shaw's play The Doctor's Dilemma, and Fleming stayed in his department for the rest of his working life.
Q 13Fleming passed the exams to qualify in which branch of medicine but never practised it, staying in the laboratory instead?
Surgery
Q 21What is Fleming said to have remarked on seeing the contaminated staphylococcus plate in September 1928?
'That's funny'
'That's funny' is the line the story gives him; the plate had sat out on the bench instead of going into the incubator, which gave the mould time to take hold before the bacteria grew.
Q 22How did the 1936 International Congress of Microbiology react to Fleming's talk on penicillin?
Nobody believed him
Nobody believed him: the world's leading bacteriologists gave no support to his idea that the mould might treat human infections and barely discussed it, a snub he took stoically before going back to work.
Q 23Where did the mould spore that landed on Fleming's famous 1928 plate most likely come from?
Surgery: he meant to become a surgeon and passed the Royal College of Surgeons fellowship in 1909, but by then the laboratory had claimed him.
Q 14During WWI, Fleming's department moved almost wholesale to a military hospital in which French port?
Boulogne
Boulogne: his department chief set up an army laboratory there to study infected wounds, and Fleming spent the war in it as a medical officer, working out why so many casualties died.
Q 15Fleming's wartime research in France showed that which routine treatment of wounded soldiers was doing more harm than good?
Antiseptics
Antiseptics damaged the white blood cells that fight infection, yet never reached the bacteria sheltering deep inside a jagged wound.
Q 16Fleming built much of the apparatus for his own experiments thanks to which practical skill?
Glassblowing
Glassblowing: during the First World War he made an 'artificial war wound' out of glass, a tube drawn out into deep pits like the recesses of a shrapnel wound, to test whether any wash could reach the germs inside them.
Q 17V. D. Allison said Fleming would never have made his two great discoveries had he been what?
Tidier
Tidier: Fleming let old culture plates pile up on his bench for weeks and looked each one over before throwing it out, which is how both chance finds caught his eye.
Q 18To collect tears for the lysozyme experiments, Fleming's lab used what, after onions failed?
Lemons
Lemons: the staff squeezed a scrap of peel in front of an open eye and sucked up the tears with a fine glass tube, and for five or six weeks their own weeping was the only supply.
Q 19Before penicillin, Fleming ran a lucrative private practice injecting the new drug Salvarsan against which disease?
Syphilis
Syphilis: his chief distrusted chemical cures yet handed him samples of Paul Ehrlich's new compound, and Fleming became one of the first doctors in Britain to inject it.
Q 20Fleming belonged to the Chelsea Arts Club and made pictures using what in place of paint?
Colourful microbes
Colourful microbes: he sketched with species that grow in different pigments, then incubated his work until the hidden picture bloomed into view.
A fungus lab downstairs
A fungus lab downstairs: on the floor below, a specialist was growing moulds to test whether they caused asthma, and a spore most likely drifted up the stairwell.
Q 24Penicillin takes its name, by way of its mould, from the Latin word for which everyday object?
A paintbrush
A paintbrush: under the microscope the mould's spore-bearing branches end in brush-like tufts, which is what the Latin penicillus describes.
Q 25Before he coined the word penicillin, what homely name did Fleming give his bacteria-killing broth?
Mould juice
Mould juice was the lab's working name for the liquid the fungus had grown in; the grander word came months later, borrowed from the mould's scientific name.
Q 26Fleming found that penicillin had no effect on the germ behind which of these diseases?
Typhoid fever
Typhoid fever is caused by a Gram-negative bacterium, a class whose extra outer membrane blocks penicillin.
Q 27What did Fleming first use penicillin for in his own lab?
Weeding germs from cultures
Weeding germs from cultures: added to a plate it killed the common bacteria and left the hard-to-grow flu bacillus standing, and that bench trick was the headline of his 1929 paper.
Q 28How did Oxford's scientists guard their precious mould against wartime loss or theft?
Rubbed it into their coats
Rubbed it into their coats: spores worked into the cloth would travel unseen, so the strain could be regrown in America.
Q 29Told in 1940 that Fleming was coming to visit, an Oxford biochemist is said to have exclaimed 'I thought he was' what?
Dead
Dead is the punchline of the tale: Fleming had just read Oxford's first paper on his old mould and rung up to ask if he could come and see the work.
Q 30Which quirk of the London weather helped the famous mould take hold on Fleming's plate before the bacteria could?
A cool spell
A cool spell: the mould grows in the cool and the bacteria need warmth, so it got going first, and when warmer days woke the bacteria they met a colony already leaking penicillin.