Alexander Fleming

ALEXANDER FLEMING

Who Was Alexander Fleming?

Alexander Fleming was a Scottish scientist who discovered the first antibiotic drug, penicillin.

Through research and experimentation, Fleming discovered a bacteria-destroying mold which he would call penicillin in 1928, paving the way for the use of antibiotics in modern healthcare. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1945 and died on March 11, 1955.

Early Years

Alexander Fleming was born in rural Lochfield, in East Ayrshire, Scotland, on August 6, 1881. His parents, Hugh and Grace were farmers, and Alexander was one of their four children. marriage. He attended the Louden Moor School, the Darvel School and Kilmarnock Academy before moving to London in 1895, where he finished his basic education at the Regent Street Polytechnic (now the University of Westminster).

Fleming was a member of the Territorial Army and served from 1900 to 1914 in the London Scottish Regiment. He entered the medical field in 1901, studying at St. Mary's Hospital Medical School at the University of London. While at St. Mary's, he won the 1908 gold medal as the top medical student.

Early Career and World War I

Fleming had planned on becoming a surgeon but he changed his path toward the then-new field of bacteriology.

During World War I, Fleming served in the Royal Army Medical Corps. He worked as a bacteriologist, studying wound infections in a makeshift lab that had been set up by Wright in Boulogne, France. Through his research there, Fleming discovered that antiseptics commonly used at the time were doing more harm than good. Therefore, more soldiers were dying from antiseptic treatment than from the infections they were trying to destroy.

Returning to St. Mary's after the war, in 1918, Fleming took on a new position: assistant director of St. Mary's Inoculation Department. (He would become a professor of bacteriology at the University of London in 1928 and an emeritus professor of bacteriology in 1948.)

The Road to Penicillin

In September 1928, Fleming returned to his laboratory after a month away with his family and noticed that a culture of Staphylococcus aureus he had left out had become contaminated with a mould (later identified as Penicillium notatum). He also discovered that the colonies of staphylococci surrounding this mould had been destroyed.

He later said of the incident, "When I woke up just after dawn on September 28, 1928, I certainly didn't plan to revolutionize all medicine by discovering the world's first antibiotic, or bacteria killer. But I suppose that was exactly what I did." He at first called the substance "mould juice," and then named it "penicillin," after the mould that produced it.

Thinking he had found an enzyme more powerful than lysozyme, Fleming decided to investigate further. What he found out, though, was that it was not an enzyme at all, but an antibiotic -- one of the first antibiotics to be discovered.

On the heels of Fleming's discovery, a team of scientists from the University of Oxford — led by Howard Florey and his co-worker, Ernst Chain — isolated and purified penicillin. The antibiotic eventually came into use during World War II, revolutionizing battlefield medicine and, on a much broader scale, the field of infection control.
Florey, Chain and Fleming shared the 1945 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, but their relationship was tainted over who should receive the most credit for penicillin.