Alexander Fleming
Alexander Fleming, the Scot who discovered penicillin, did it by going on holiday and leaving a messy lab bench behind. A mouldy dish changed medicine for ever.
Published
Quick Facts
- Born
- 6 August 1881, Lochfield Farm near Darvel, Ayrshire, Scotland
- Died
- 11 March 1955, London
- Famous for
- Spotting the antibacterial power of Penicillium mould in 1928
- Nobel Prize
- Physiology or Medicine, 1945, shared with Howard Florey and Ernst Chain
- Worked at
- St Mary's Hospital, Paddington, London
- Earlier discovery
- Lysozyme, an enzyme in tears and saliva, in 1922
- Knighted
- 1944
- Resting place
- St Paul's Cathedral, London
The holiday that changed medicine
In late summer 1928, Alexander Fleming went away for a break and left a pile of Petri dishes stacked on his bench at St Mary's Hospital in Paddington. When he came back in September, one dish had been contaminated by a blue-green mould. Around the mould, the Staphylococcus bacteria he had been growing had been wiped out. Plenty of scientists would have binned the dish. Fleming looked closer. He identified the mould as a Penicillium and found that the 'mould juice' he grew from it killed a range of harmful bacteria. He named the active substance penicillin.
A farm boy from Ayrshire
Fleming was born on a hill farm near Darvel in Ayrshire, the son of a farmer, and grew up walking miles to school across the moors. He later credited the outdoor life with sharpening his powers of observation. He moved to London as a teenager, worked in a shipping office, and only turned to medicine after a small inheritance came his way. He enrolled at St Mary's Hospital Medical School and stayed there for most of his career. He was also a keen member of the rifle club, which is said to be partly why St Mary's wanted to keep him on.
The scientist who painted with bacteria
Fleming had a playful streak. He grew colourful bacteria on agar plates and arranged them into little pictures, painting with living microbes that would only reveal their colours once they had grown. Ballerinas, houses and figures all appeared this way. His lab was famously untidy, and that trait is usually part of the penicillin story. But he was also an inventive researcher: in 1922 he discovered lysozyme, a natural antibacterial enzyme found in tears and saliva, after a drop from his own runny nose killed bacteria on a dish. Penicillin wasn't an overnight sensation. Fleming published his findings in 1929, but the mould juice was hard to purify and he moved on to other work.
The team that turned a curiosity into a cure
The leap from lab curiosity to life-saving drug came at Oxford in the late 1930s. Howard Florey and Ernst Chain, with a team that included Norman Heatley, worked out how to extract and produce penicillin in usable quantities. Their first patient trials in 1941 showed what it could do. As the Second World War raged, production was scaled up with help from American laboratories, and penicillin was in use for wounded soldiers by the time of the D-Day landings in 1944. Fleming was knighted in 1944, and in 1945 the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was shared between him, Florey and Chain. Fleming became a worldwide celebrity, while Florey, who did much of the hard work, stayed far less well known.
A warning he saw coming
Fleming noticed early that bacteria could become resistant to penicillin if it was used carelessly. In his 1945 Nobel lecture he warned that under-dosing could teach microbes to survive the drug. His worry has proved right. Antibiotic resistance is one of the biggest health challenges today, and his warning is still quoted by doctors.
Where his mark remains today
The laboratory where Fleming discovered penicillin is preserved at St Mary's Hospital in Paddington as the Alexander Fleming Laboratory Museum, set up to resemble the room where the mould appeared in 1928. Fleming's ashes lie in the crypt of St Paul's Cathedral, among Britain's great figures. Back in Scotland, Ayrshire remembers its farmer's son proudly, and statues and plaques around the world honour him. And every time someone takes a course of antibiotics, they are using the legacy of a tidy-minded observer who didn't throw away a spoiled dish.
Notable people
- Alexander Fleming
- Howard Florey
- Ernst Chain
- Norman Heatley
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