Sir Alexander Fleming, more famously known as just Alexander Fleming is best known for discovering the first antibiotic: penicillin. Alexander Fleming’s discovery was important for many reasons most notably for starting the antibiotic era. Fleming was awarded the Nobel Prize for penicillin along with fellow scientists Howard Walter Flowery and Ernest Boris Chain. Penicillin was used a lot to help wounded soldiers during WWII. A lot of people know Fleming because he created penicillin but nobody knows about the real Fleming. Who Sir Alexander was and how he found penicillin. Now without further ado let’s go right in and into the life of Alexander Fleming.
Sir Alexander Fleming was born in Ayrshire, Scotland on August 6th, 1881 to a Scottish farmer named Hugh Fleming. Alexander was the seventh of eight children his father had. Fleming’s mother was named Grace Stirling Morton. Fleming had started his schooling at Louden Moor before going to a larger school named Darvel and then in 1984, enrolled in Kilmarnock Academy. In 1985 however, Alexander moved to London where he lived with his older brother Thomas and finished his basic education at Regent Street Polytechnic (now called the University of Westminster.) After finishing school at Polytechnic, Fleming worked for 4 years as a shipping clerk before enrolling in St.Mary’s Medical School in 1901 at the University of London. While at St.Mary’s, Fleming won the 1908 gold medal as a top medical student. Sir Alexander wanted to continue his career as a surgeon but St.Mary’s offered him a temporary position in the Inoculation Department to do research on the new field of bacteriology. There, Alexander would learn about bacteria under the guidance of bacteriologists and immunologist Sir Almroth Edward Wright, whose new ideas on vaccine therapy offered a new direction in the medical field.
Fleming never lost contact with St.Mary’s but between 1909 to 1914 Fleming established himself with a successful private practice as a venereologist. One year later, Fleming would marry a woman named Sarah Marion McElroy, an Irish nurse. After marrying Sarah, Fleming would join the Army Medical Corps as a captain during WWI. During the war Fleming worked as a bacteriologist, researching wound infections in a make-shift lab in Boulogne, France. While doing research Fleming figured out that the antiseptics the soldiers were using were actually doing more harm than good and at times killing the soldiers. After the war was finished in 1918, Fleming returned to his wife as well as returning to St.Mary’s as assistant director of St. Mary's Inoculation Department. He stayed in this position doing more research when in November of 1921, while Fleming was treating a cold, Fleming discovered a bodily fluid with a mild antiseptic effect which he named lysozyme. Fleming’s discovery of lysozyme made his first major discovery which also happened to help research immune research incredibly. With this discovery, Fleming would keep on researching in the field of bacteriology when in September of 1928, a culture of germ named Staphylococcus aureus that Fleming was working on got contaminated by a mold.
Fleming noticed that this mold had created a bacteria-free circle around it. Curious, Fleming studied the mold a little longer and saw that eventually, the mold killed the germ off completely. Fleming would experiment further and figure out that this mold that he had thought was an enzyme was actually one of the very first antibiotics. When Fleming first found this mold he called it ‘mould juice’ before later calling it penicillin. Fleming would later say about 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.” Fleming was a man who worked alone but after identifying this would juices potential he and some junior researchers tried to stabilize and purify it but failed. But this failure led him to realize that this mold could have major medical properties. After naming Fleming’s mould juice to penicillin, Fleming wrote many articles about penicillin and lysozome which eventually got the attention of a research team in Oxford, led by Howard Florey and his co-worker Ernest Chain, a Nazi Germany refugee. Together the triplets stabilized and purified penicillin and shared a Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine.
Because of penicillin, Fleming became head of the Inoculation Department, which was renamed the Wright-Fleming Institute. Along with that, Fleming also served as president of the Society for General Microbiology, a member of the Pontifical Academy of Science. Fleming was also an honorary member of nearly every single medical and scientific society in the world. To finish off Fleming’s achievements he was knighted in 1944, becoming from just Alexander Fleming to Sir Alexander Fleming. Eventually, Fleming died on March 11, 1955, in his home in London, England with his second wife Amalia Fleming, and his son Robert, who was now all grown up.
Did you like the way he followed his passion and stuck with it no matter where he was, whether on the battlefield or in a lab? I sure find that interesting. I feel like Sir Medicator should deserve more love not just from the medical community but from all people. I think we have enough fun reading about people in the scientific and medical fields. Let's do something even more fun now. So without further ado let's play our way into the life of The Great Gamer!