Birthday of Alexander Fleming (6th August 1881)

Fleming was a Scottish biologist and pharmacologist who is most famous for his 'accidental' discovery of the now essential life-saving drug penicillin which can be hailed as one of the most important discoveries ever made and one which has already saved millions of lives worldwide.

Alexander Fleming was born at Lochfield farm in Scotland and following a successful early education, he won a scholarship to Kilmarnock Academy, before moving to London to attend the Royal Polytechnic Institute. Following the receipt of a fairly generous inheritance Fleming decided to study to become a physician, on the advice of his elder brother Tom. He enrolled at St Mary's Hospital, Paddington, London on his chosen course in 1903, from where he graduated with distinction in 1906.

He was about to take up the surgeon position he was offered until the captain of the St Mary's rifle club - of which Fleming was a highly-valued member - instead recommended he join the research department at St Mary's, where he became assistant bacteriologist. He gained M.B. and then B.Sc. with Gold Medal in 1908, and became a lecturer at St. Mary's until 1914 when he joined the First World War effort as a captain in the Army Medical Corps. When the War came to an end in 1918, he returned to St Mary's where he was elected Professor of Bacteriology in 1928.

During his early research career, he put a lot of effort into researching antiseptics, after having seen so many injured soldiers die from septicemia as a result of their infected wounds. He then moved onto exploring staphylococci and this led him on to his miracle discovery of penicillin, which is detailed below:

On 3 September 1928, Fleming returned to his laboratory having spent August on holiday with his family. Before leaving he had stacked all his cultures of staphylococci on a bench in a corner of his laboratory. On returning, Fleming noticed that one culture was contaminated with a fungus, and that the colonies of staphylococci that had immediately surrounded it had been destroyed, whereas other colonies further away were normal. Fleming showed the contaminated culture to his former assistant Merlin Price who said "that's how you discovered lysozyme". Fleming identified the mould that had contaminated his culture plates as being from the Penicillium genus, and (after some months' of apparently calling it "mould juice") Fleming formally named the substance it released penicillin on 7 March 1929.

Fleming is often quoted as saying: "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".

Why not read all about Fleming's discovery and similar revolutions in modern medicine by visiting the eLibrary and looking at the resource 'Reader C: Medicine and Care' from the Science in Society series?