JEREMY CORBETT
JEREMY FINDS OUT JUST HOW MUCH THERE IS TO LEARN FROM THE MAN WHO GAVE US PENICILLIN
Ithink it’s important in life to take the time to stop and smell the scientists. Often, I pause and ponder great minds that have delivered us the wonderful world we now inhabit: the bloke that invented the internet, whoever came up with chocolate raisins and the woman who invented beer.
But this week I’ve been heaping what praise I have on the man who gave us penicillin: Alexander Fleming. Because recently he saved my life.
You can read about my brush with face-death elsewhere in this fine publication, the focus of this column is going back on the scientist!
Though there is some disagreement about just how messy Fleming was, there is no disputing that an avoidance of cleaning-up and putting away, combined with taking a nice long holiday, led directly to the Nobel Prize-winning discovery which changed medicine.
Back in 1928, before he took off on a two-week break, he left his lab in a shambles: I imagine empty pizza boxes, with old underwear hanging on the Bunsen burners. He also left a bacterial culture sitting on the bench instead of in the incubator. When he returned, a fungus had contaminated it, killing the bacteria within.
“That’s funny,” he said and with those words launched the age of modern antibiotics.
There are other great lessons from Mr Fleming, the first of which is the value of branding: for the first few months he called his discovery Mould Juice. I doubt I’d be sitting here today if he hadn’t changed it to the more sciency-sounding penicillin. It took over a decade from “that’s funny” until other bright minds got on board and managed to turn one mouldy Petri dish into usable quantities of penicillin, saving lives. Millions of lives! All because he’d hung onto his fungus-covered bacteria bowl for more than 10 years!
I wondered if Mrs Fleming was constantly telling him to throw out “that old thin”.
My wonder ceased when I read he was married to a trained nurse, because trained nurses may be more important to me than Mr Fleming himself: anyone can invent a drug, but it takes a very special breed to administer it to sick and wimpy patients day in and day out.
The final lesson is a serious one. Mr Fleming found using too little penicillin or for too short a time meant the bacteria could survive and mutate to become resistant.
It’s a message I believe most people now know, but it bears repeating: finish your course of antibiotics! Every single pill!
Because should I ever get another fat face full of infection, I want to be saved, once again, by Mr Fleming’s fungus.