Back from holidays

A discarded petri dish was the key to the discovery of penicillin

Alexander Fleming. Born 6 August 1881, Lochfield, Ayrshire. Died 11 March 1955, London.

Consider how many lives Alexander Fleming has saved with the discovery of penicillin. Most people return from holiday to a stack of mail; Fleming returned to a universal miracle cure for infection.

Born on 6 August 1881, Alexander Fleming grew up on an Ayrshire farm and spent much of his youth observing the natural world and recording his findings – a scientific dictum he would adhere to all his working life.

At 14, he moved to London to complete his education. A legacy left to him by his uncle allowed him to pursue a career in medicine. He chose St Mary’s Medical School after experiencing the water polo team’s admirable sportsmanship first-hand.

He had hoped to qualify as a surgeon but at the turn of the century he accepted a post in the exciting new field of bacteriology.

During the First World War, Fleming worked as a ranking army medic from a military hospital lab set up in a French casino in Boulogne. Here he became an expert on the bacteriology of wound infection. Returning from a holiday on 9 September 1928 he discovered Penicillium Notatum mould growing wild in a petri dish and destroying all the bacteria in its path.

He moved to isolate the antibiotic agent and the rest is history.

Eight months later, Fleming presented his research to the scientific community in the British Journal of Experimental Pathology, but it turned few heads. Fleming was a lone researcher and knew his limitations. Unable to proceed further with his research, Howard Florey and Ernst Boris Chain stepped in to lead a team synthesising penicillin and passed clinical trials between 1939 and 1941.

Fleming, Florey and Chain all accepted the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1945 for the discovery and development of rudimentary antibiotics.

Renowned historian Kevin Brown holds the honour of being Trust Archivist and Alexander Fleming Laboratory Museum Curator at a reconstructed lab in the very room Fleming made his world-changing discovery.

He said the race for penicillin production was a key development contributing to the allied victory in the Second World War. “The effect of the war was to almost hold them back at first because they were having to deal with shortages and needing to improvise.

“From 1941 they were able to bring penicillin into some limited use and labs at the William Dunn School of Pathology at Oxford were, for a time, the biggest penicillin production unit in the United Kingdom, perhaps in the world.

“Having a way to fight infection gave you a sizeable military advantage – you could get your men back into action more quickly than your enemies.

“In America, that was a big impetus to the development of modern production methods of penicillin.”