Alexander Fleming

Alexander Fleming . Discoverer of penicillin . Bacteriologist. At St. Mary’s Hospital in London , he reported his discovery in a paper published in 1929 in the British Journal of Experimental Pathology. In 1944 Fleming received a noble title from the British Crown and in 1945 he won with Florey and Chain the Nobel Prize in Medicine .

Biographical summary

He was born on the Lochfield Ayrshire farm on August 6 , 1881 , near Darvel, today part of Strathclyde, a rural village in Scotland. At 13 he moved to London, where he worked with his brother Tom. He will not begin to study Medicine until he is 20, at St. Mary Hospital School, where he holds the title of Sir. Almorth Edward Wright , immune mechanism researcher; Almost by chance, in 1906, Fleming entered his Inoculation Department, where he would remain throughout his life.

Doctored in 1908 , he spent World War I in France , with Wright’s team studying the treatment of traumatic infections; and on leave in 1915 he married Sarah, an Irish nurse, who would be an excellent companion for most of his days. he died in London, England on March 11, 1955

But he had to exceed 40 years of age before making his first discovery:

Discoveries

Penicillin was discovered by the bacteriologist Alexander Fleming at St. Mary’s Hospital in London , who reported his discovery in a communication published in 1929 in the British Journal of Experimental Pathology.

Fleming’s two discoveries occurred in the 1920s and although they were accidental, they demonstrate the great capacity for observation and intuition of this Scottish doctor. A well-conducted series of experiments led him to also find in tears and other organic products such as egg white, etc., a liquefying action of various bacteria that would correspond to a widely diffused substance which he called lysozyme. The discovery of lysozyme It occurred after mucus from his nose, from a sneeze, fell onto a Petri dish in which a bacterial culture was growing. A few days later he noticed that the bacteria had been destroyed in the place where the nasal fluid had settled.

Fleming’s laboratory was routinely cluttered, which was an advantage for his next discovery. In September 1928, he was conducting several experiments in his laboratory and upon inspecting his cultures before destroying them he noticed that a colony of a fungus had grown spontaneously, as a contaminant, in one of the Petri dishes seeded with Staphylococcus aureus.

Fleming later observed the plates and found that the bacterial colonies around the fungus (later identified as Penicilliumnotatum) were transparent due to bacterial lysis. Lysis meant the death of the bacteria, and where appropriate, that of the pathogenic bacteria (Staphylococcus aureus) grown in the plate. Although he immediately recognized the significance of this finding, his colleagues underestimated it. Fleming reported his discovery of penicillin in the British Journal of Experimental Pathology in 1929.

Fleming worked with the fungus for a while but obtaining and purifying penicillin from Penicilliumnotatum cultures proved difficult and more suitable for chemists. The scientific community believed that penicillin would only be useful for treating banal infections and therefore did not pay attention to it.

However, the antibiotic aroused the interest of North American researchers during World War II, who tried to emulate German military medicine which used sulfonamides. The North American chemists Ernst Boris Chain and Howard Walter Florey developed a method for purifying penicillin that allowed its synthesis and commercial distribution to the rest of the population. By about 1945, the use of penicillin as a medicine was already possible, which was good news for wartime. ^[1]

Fleming did not patent his discovery, believing that this would make it easier to spread an antibiotic necessary for the treatment of the numerous infections that plagued the population. For his discoveries, Fleming shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1945 along with Ernst Boris Chain and Howard Walter Florey.

Fleming was a member of the Chelsea Arts Club, a private club for artists founded in 1891 at the suggestion of painter James McNeil Whistler. It is said anecdotally that Fleming was admitted to the club after making “germ paintings”, these paintings consisted of brushing the canvas with pigmented bacteria, which were invisible while he painted but emerged with intense colors once grown after incubating the canvas. .

His discovery of penicillin meant a drastic change for modern medicine, starting the so-called “Age of Antibiotics”, other later researchers contributed new antibiotics, such as streptomycin used for the treatment of tuberculosis, saving millions of lives.

Fleming’s scientific contribution is twofold because in addition to discovering a chemical molecule (penicillin) he also found a protein molecule (lysozyme) with antibiotic activity. Proteins (e.g. lysozyme) and antibiotic peptides are natural components of the innate immunity of animals that could be used for therapeutic purposes similar to penicillin. For this reason Fleming can be considered the first to discover an antimicrobial protein.