Alexander Fleming

Alexander Fleming carried the Sun in Leo, the luminary at full strength in its own domicile, the lion-king whose vitality blazes at the centre of its own solar system. Yet his fell in the second house of resources and enduring value, so that solar pride expressed itself through building something of lasting worth the world could stand upon. And what greater treasure did any physician leave than his 1928 discovery of penicillin, the first broadly effective antibiotic and, as it has been called, the single greatest victory ever won over disease. For it he shared the 1945 Nobel Prize in Medicine.

His Moon in Sagittarius is the philosopher's psyche, at peace through freedom, curiosity and the open-minded chase after knowledge, and it sat in the sixth house of health, service and daily work, the very house of the healer. Here the wandering, questing mind found its calling amid the microbes, cultures and quiet routines of the laboratory bench. Cancer rising gave this Scottish microbiologist the sensitive, nurturing mask of one born to care and to protect. It was that unhurried, watchful attention, the willingness to notice what others would have scrubbed away, that let a stray mould on a forgotten dish become the medicine that has saved countless millions.