Sir Alexander Fleming was born at Lochfield near Darvel in Ayrshire, Scotland on August 6th, 1881. He attended Louden Moor School, Darvel School, and Kilmarnock Academy before moving to London where he attended the Polytechnic. He spent four years in a shipping office before entering St. Mary’s Medical School. Fleming became a doctor and bacteriologist who discovered penicillin and received the Nobel Prize in 1945. His research played a pivotal role in the development of modern antibiotics.
During the first world war, Fleming and others were based in Boulogne, France. They were involved in the treatment of the wounded in the battlefields. Fleming worked as a bacteriologist; studying wounds infections in a makeshift lab that had been set up by his mentor bacteriologist and immunologist Sir Amroth Edward Wright.
Through his research there, Fleming discovered that antiseptics commonly used at the time were doing more harm than good, as their diminishing effects on the body’s immunity agents largely outweighed their ability to break down harmful bacteria — therefore, more soldiers were dying from antiseptic treatment than from the infections they were trying to destroy. Fleming recommended that, for more effective healing, wounds simply be kept dry and clean. However, his recommendations largely went unheeded.
Discovering Penicillin:
The penicillin was discovered by Fleming in London in September 1928. This discovery of penicillin, one of the world’s antibiotics, marks a true turning point in human history- when doctors had a tool that could completely cure their patients of deadly infectious diseases.
Fleming was experimenting with the influenza virus in the Laboratory of the Inoculation Department at St. Mary’s Hospital in London. Often described as a careless lab technician, Fleming returned from a two-week vacation to find that a mold had developed on an accidentally contaminated staphylococcus culture plate. Upon examination of the mold, he noticed that the culture prevented the growth of staphylococci.
“The staphylococcus colonies became transparent and were obviously undergoing lysis … the broth in which the mold had been grown at room temperature for one to two weeks had acquired marked inhibitory, bactericidal and bacteriolytic properties to many of the more common pathogenic bacteria.” Fleming