Farm boy who became a Nobel prize-winner
The Arran History Society invited Stuart Wilson of Kilmarnock to speak at the April meeting.
More than 75 members and visitors attended on a cold, windy and snowy day which the speaker, having sailed from Ardrossan, described as ‘bracing’, writes Norma Davidson.
Stuart studied biochemistry at Glasgow University, taught for more than 40 years and became head of Kilmarnock Academy.
He was happy to renew his acquaintance with Arran, which he first visited more than 65 years ago with his granny and later visits bringing school parties to Holy Isle.
He has a love of local history, and as a scientist it was natural that he chose as his subject Sir Alexander Fleming, born in the Darvel area in 1881, a pioneer of the modern antibiotic and Nobel Prize winner.
He told us of a trip 12 years ago he made to China with eight pupils. On visiting a Chinese village school, the official reception committee boasted that one former pupil had won a Nobel Prize for Physics.
Stuart took great delight in replying that his old school in Kilmarnock had two Nobel Prize winners, one being Fleming and the other Professor Boyd Orr for his work on infant nutrition.
Stuart actually knew a Frank Donnelly who was born in Darvel and was presented with the Dux Medal of Darvel by Fleming, who also gave him a wooden mounted medal with Fleming’s head on the obverse and a microscope, Petri dish and mould spores on the reverse. He remembered him as a very pleasant person and quite modest, despite his fame.
Indeed, he sent a handwritten ‘thank you’ letter to Frank and his twin brother Donald, for a Christmas card the boys had sent.
Fleming was born on August 6, 1881, at Lochfield Farm, a very remote moorland farm in the Irvine Valley. He had several siblings and attended Loudoun Moor School. At the age of 13 he was attending Kilmarnock Academy, a large and imposing red sandstone building. During his time there he stayed with an aunt during the week and travelled home by train to Darvel for weekends and his holidays.
By the age of 14 he was working as a shipping clerk in London where his brothers were studying medicine. He gained entrance to the Polytechnic where he shone academically . In 1902 he was a medical student of St Mary’s, a medical school chosen by him because it had an excellent water polo team - and he was keen swimmer. In 1908 he graduated with an MB.BS. degree from the University of London. He was awarded the gold medal that year. Despite being a promising surgeon, bacteriology won and he joined Almroth Wright in the inoculation department at St Mary’s, where he stayed all his working life.
During the Great War he served in the RAMC, joining the London Scottish and working in a hospital near Boulogne in Northern France. He was appalled by the number of troops who initially survived their wounds but to die later of infection. He started looking for the magic bullet to kill bacteria.
In 1921 and back at St Mary’s he discovered Lysozyme, an antibacterial enzyme which occurs naturally in human tissues and secretions. He experimented with human tears and actually paid tear donors. Lysozyme had little effect on serious bacteria, but results alerted him to the possibility of antibiotics.
After a holiday in 1928 he returned to the laboratory to find Petri dishes left on his bench had grown a mould. The bacterial colonies on the blood agar in the Petri dishes had been repelled in the area around the mould, leaving a clear and uninfected zone. Initially this was called ‘mould juice’, and became penicilliumno-tatum. By 1935 Chain & Florey were working in parallel in the USA.
The first patient to be injected was a Harry Lambert in 1942, and the results were startling, but as only a minute quantity was available a complete therapy could not be given.
Work then was concentrated on extracting on a bigger scale, and all available Penicillin was used on personnel injured during World War II.
Much work was done in Oxford by Norman Heatley and Edward Abraham, who worked on extracting the drug on a larger scale. They too deserve a mention in this history of the drug which would help millions.
It is licensed to GSK and is still manufactured in the UK. Since Fleming’s first observations many others have continued the work, and broad spectrum antibiotics are now in use. Penicillin remains the most prescribed antibiotic today in one of its forms.
Fleming was twice married, firstly to an Irish nurse, who died and he married secondly in 1953 to a research assistant, a Greek bacteriologist. He had one son.
He came globally recognised and memorials were erected to him. Portraits painted, stamps issued, streets named after him, a Guernsey £5 note and a Clydesdale Bank £5 note being a few acknowledgements to him.
His printed list of honours covers four pages, and vary to the extent of being golf club captain and recipient of the Nobel Prize for Medicine, alongside Chain and Florey. He died in 1955, and is buried in St Paul’s Cathedral.
On the 50th anniversary of his death celebrations were held in Darvel where there is a bust of him and a memorial garden. This former Freeman of Darvel was honoured by a lecture from Sir Hugh Pennington, a modern-day bacteriologist and pioneer for public health. A stone at Lochfield was unveiled in 1957, and a memorial to him and his first wife was erected in County Mayo.
Worth mentioning are two memorials to Fleming outside the bullrings in Barcelona and Madrid. Pre-Penicillin, a matador who was gored by a bull would frequently die due to infection. The Madrid memorial has a matador doffing his cap - the ultimate honour - to the bust of Fleming.
The society thanked Stuart for a wonderful talk on a fascinating subject. From Ayrshire farm boy to Nobel prizewinner - amazing!
The next meeting will be on Monday May 15 at 2 pm in Brodick Hall. when the speaker will be Mhari Hastings from the Scottish Savings Bank Museum at Ruthwell, Dumfries. She will give a talk on the history of savings banks, which were founded in Scotland.