Sir Alexander Fleming (6 August 1881 – 11 March 1955) was a Scottish doctor and scientist who studied tiny living things, such as bacteria. He shared the 1945 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Howard Florey and Ernst Chain for discovering penicillin and showing how it could cure diseases caused by bacteria. This was the first antibiotic ever found. In 1928, Fleming discovered a substance later called benzylpenicillin (or penicillin G) from a type of mold called Penicillium rubens. This discovery is often called the "single greatest victory ever achieved over disease."

In 1922, Fleming also found an enzyme called lysozyme in his nasal discharge. He also discovered a type of bacteria, which he named Micrococcus lysodeikticus, later renamed Micrococcus luteus.

Fleming was given a title of knight in 1944 for his scientific work. In 1999, he was listed among Time magazine's 100 Most Important People of the 20th century. In 2002, he was included in the BBC's television poll of the 100 Greatest Britons. In 2009, he was voted third "greatest Scot" in an opinion poll by STV, behind Robert Burns and William Wallace.

Early life and education

Alexander Fleming was born on August 6, 1881, at Lochfield farm near Darvel in Ayrshire, Scotland. He was the third of four children of Hugh Fleming, a farmer, and Grace Stirling Morton, the daughter of a neighboring farmer. Hugh Fleming had four children from his first marriage. He was 59 years old when he married Grace, and he died when Alexander was seven years old.

Fleming attended Loudoun Moor School and Darvel School. He received a two-year scholarship to Kilmarnock Academy before moving to London, where he studied at the Royal Polytechnic Institution. After working in a shipping company office for four years, Alexander inherited money from his uncle, John Fleming. His older brother, Tom, was a doctor and encouraged Alexander to pursue medicine. In 1903, Alexander enrolled at St Mary's Hospital Medical School in Paddington (now part of Imperial College London). He earned a medical degree with distinction in 1906.

From 1900 to 1914, Fleming served as a private in the London Scottish Regiment of the Volunteer Force. He was a member of the rifle club at the medical school. The club's captain, wanting Fleming to stay on the team, recommended he join the research department at St Mary's. There, Fleming became an assistant bacteriologist to Sir Almroth Wright, a leader in vaccine therapy and immunology. In 1908, Fleming earned a BSc degree with a gold medal in bacteriology and worked as a lecturer at St Mary's until 1914.

In 1914, Fleming was commissioned as a lieutenant and promoted to captain in 1917. He served in World War I with the Royal Army Medical Corps and was Mentioned in Dispatches. He and his colleagues worked in battlefield hospitals on the Western Front in France.

In 1918, Fleming returned to St Mary's Hospital. In 1928, he was elected Professor of Bacteriology at the University of London.

Scientific contributions

During World War I, Fleming, along with Leonard Colebrook and Sir Almroth Wright, worked to support the war effort by moving the Inoculation Department of St Mary's Hospital to a British military hospital in Boulogne-sur-Mer. Fleming served as a temporary lieutenant in the Royal Army Medical Corps and saw many soldiers die from blood infections caused by wounds. At the time, antiseptics were used to treat infected wounds, but Fleming noticed that these treatments often made the injuries worse. In 1917, he wrote an article in The Lancet describing an experiment he conducted using his own glassblowing skills. He explained that antiseptics worked well on the surface of wounds but failed to reach bacteria deep inside. These deep bacteria were protected from the antiseptic, and the treatment also removed helpful substances that helped the body fight infection. Wright supported Fleming’s findings, but most army doctors continued to use antiseptics even when they harmed patients.

At St Mary's Hospital, Fleming studied bacteria and substances that could kill them. His research assistant, V. D. Allison, noted that Fleming was not a careful researcher and often expected unusual bacterial growth in his experiments. Fleming once joked that Allison was too neat in the lab, and Allison believed that Fleming’s untidy methods helped him make important discoveries.

In late 1921, Fleming was growing bacteria on agar plates when he noticed a plate was contaminated with bacteria from the air. When he added nasal mucus to the plate, the bacteria stopped growing, creating a clear circle around the mucus. He tested other substances, including tears from his coworkers, and found that they also killed bacteria. He tested many other materials, such as sputum, blood, and egg whites, and found that all contained a substance that killed certain bacteria. He shared his findings with scientific groups, but few people were interested.

Fleming named the substance lysozyme and published his research in 1922. However, lysozyme was only effective against harmless bacteria, not dangerous ones, so it had limited use as a medicine. Fleming later described a patient with a cold as himself in his notes, and he identified the bacteria in nasal mucus as Micrococcus lysodeikticus. This name was later changed to Micrococcus luteus. The importance of lysozyme was not widely recognized until the late 20th century, when scientists realized it was part of the body’s natural defense system.

By 1927, Fleming was studying staphylococci, a type of bacteria. In 1928, he returned to his lab after a vacation and found that a culture plate had become contaminated with a fungus. The area around the fungus had no bacteria, and Fleming noted, “That’s funny.” He identified the fungus as a type of Penicillium and later named the antibacterial substance in it “penicillin.”

Fleming tested penicillin and found it killed many harmful bacteria, such as those that cause scarlet fever and pneumonia, but not others like typhoid fever. He shared his discovery in 1929, but few people paid attention. The laboratory where Fleming discovered penicillin is now a museum at St Mary's Hospital. Scientists later traced the fungus to a room below Fleming’s lab.

Fleming continued his research, but it was not until years later that penicillin became widely used as medicine.

Personal life

On December 24, 1915, Fleming married Sarah Marion McElroy, a trained nurse from Killala, County Mayo, Ireland. Their only child, Robert Fleming (1924–2015), became a general medical practitioner. After Sarah’s death in 1949, Fleming married Amalia Koutsouri-Vourekas, a Greek colleague at St. Mary’s, on April 9, 1953. Amalia died in 1986.

Fleming was raised in a Presbyterian family, while his first wife, Sarah, was a Roman Catholic who no longer practiced the faith. Some sources say he was not very religious. Their son, Robert, later joined the Anglican church, though he reportedly shared his parents’ generally non-religious attitude.

When Fleming learned that Robert D. Coghill and Andrew J. Moyer had patented a method for producing penicillin in the United States in 1944, he was very upset. He said:

From 1921 until his death in 1955, Fleming owned a country home called "The Dhoon" in Barton Mills, Suffolk.

Death

On March 11, 1955, Fleming died at his home in London due to a heart attack. His ashes are buried in St Paul's Cathedral.

Awards and legacy

Fleming’s discovery of penicillin changed modern medicine by starting the era of useful antibiotics. Penicillin has saved and continues to save millions of people worldwide.

The laboratory at St. Mary’s Hospital, where Fleming discovered penicillin, now houses the Fleming Museum, a well-known attraction in London. His school, St. Mary’s Hospital Medical School, combined with Imperial College London in 1988. The Sir Alexander Fleming Building on the South Kensington campus opened in 1998. At that time, Fleming’s son Robert and his great-granddaughter Claire were introduced to the Queen. Today, the building is a major location for preclinical teaching at the Imperial College School of Medicine.

Another school Fleming attended, the Royal Polytechnic Institution (now the University of Westminster), has a student residence named Alexander Fleming House, located near Old Street.

This discovery changed the course of history. The active ingredient in the mold, which Fleming called penicillin, was found to be a powerful infection-fighting substance. When its importance was recognized, penicillin became the most effective life-saving drug ever made. It changed how bacterial infections were treated forever. By the middle of the 20th century, Fleming’s discovery led to the creation of a large pharmaceutical industry that produced synthetic penicillins. These medicines helped cure some of humanity’s oldest and most dangerous diseases, including syphilis, gangrene, and tuberculosis.

Myths

By 1942, penicillin, made as a pure substance, was still not enough to use in medical treatments. When Fleming used the first samples made by the Oxford team to treat Harry Lambert, who had a serious infection called streptococcal meningitis, the successful treatment became major news, especially shared in The Times. Wright was surprised that Fleming and the Oxford team were not named in the article, even though Oxford was credited as the source of the drug. Wright wrote to the editor of The Times, which then interviewed Fleming, but Florey stopped the Oxford team from speaking to the media. Because of this, only Fleming received much attention in the news, leading people to wrongly believe he alone discovered and developed the drug. Fleming later called this situation "the Fleming myth."

A common story about Winston Churchill's father paying for Fleming's education after Fleming's father saved young Winston from death is not true. According to the biography Penicillin Man: Alexander Fleming and the Antibiotic Revolution by Kevin Brown, Fleming wrote to his friend André Gratia that this was "A wondrous fable." Also, Fleming did not save Winston Churchill during World War II. Churchill was helped by Lord Moran using a drug called sulphonamides when he became sick in Carthage, Tunisia, in 1943. On December 21, 1943, The Daily Telegraph and The Morning Post reported that penicillin saved Churchill, but this was incorrect. Churchill was actually saved by a new sulphonamide drug named sulphapyridine, known at the time as M&B 693. This drug was discovered and made by May & Baker Ltd in Dagenham, Essex, a company owned by the French group Rhône-Poulenc. Later, Churchill referred to the drug in a radio broadcast as "This admirable M&B."