Alexander Fleming
Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin by not tidying up. Born in 1881 on a farm in Ayrshire, he was the seventh of eight children, worked as a shipping clerk in London for four years, and went to medical school at St Mary's on a small inheritance — where he was recruited to the research department partly because the team wanted him for its rifle club. He served in the Royal Army Medical Corps in France in the First World War and published work showing that the strong antiseptics used on deep wounds killed the body's own defensive cells faster than the bacteria, and made outcomes worse. It was largely ignored. He discovered lysozyme, an enzyme in tears and mucus with mild antibacterial action, in 1922, after his own nasal drippings landed on a culture plate. In September 1928, returning from holiday, he found a staphylococcus plate contaminated by a mould with a clear ring around it where the bacteria had dissolved. The mould was Penicillium notatum. He identified the active substance, named it penicillin, and published in 1929. He then could not purify it in useful quantity, and let it go. Howard Florey and Ernst Chain at Oxford took the paper up in 1938, isolated and stabilised the compound, proved it in mice in 1940 and in patients in 1941, and got it manufactured in America in time for the invasion of Europe. The three shared the 1945 Nobel Prize. Fleming warned in his lecture that underdosing would breed resistance. He died in 1955.
- Lived: 1881 CE – 1955 CE
- Nationality: Scottish
- Roles: bacteriologist, physician
