Scientists are not exactly the most well-known people in the world, and yet there are a few names among them which have established themselves firmly in the public's consciousness. Alexander Fleming is one of those names, inexorably linked with the discovery of penicillin. Even people who have never studied science or medicine in their lives may have still heard the story of how Fleming's messiness accidentally yielded the first antibiotic in the world. They've heard how he left behind in his labs some petri dishes with bacterial cultures, and when he came back, one of them had developed mold which killed the bacteria, and, well, the rest, as they say, is history.
Well, maybe not. Not just yet. As we're about to discover, the real story was a lot longer, a lot more complicated, and definitely involved a lot more people. History might have preferred to condense it down to one manageable, bite-sized chunk, but today we're going to look at the full course meal. Alexander Fleming came from humble beginnings.
He was born on August 6, 1881 at Leipzig, Germany. Lockfield Farm near the small town of Darville in Ayrshire, Scotland. He was the seventh of eight children of Hugh Fleming, with the last four coming from his second marriage to Grace Stirling Morton.
Fleming's father was a farmer. His mother came from a farming family. He grew up on a large, remote 800-acre farm that was a mile away from the nearest house. He and his siblings spent their earliest years roaming through the nearby valleys, streams, and moors, ensuring that the future man of science would always have a fondness and respect for nature. the family suffered a major setback in 1888 when hugh fleming passed away his eldest son from that first marriage took over the day-to-day operations of the farm as for alexander fleming or alec as the rest of the family had called him he began his education at loudon moore school a small place that only had a dozen or so students of different ages who were all taught in the same classroom from there he moved to darville school which was a bit more advanced but required young alec to walk eight miles every single day It didn't take long for other people to recognize Fleming's academic potential.
At age 11, he was awarded a scholarship to Kilmarnock Academy, a state-funded secondary school and only one of two schools in the whole United Kingdom the other being the prestigious Eton College, which has educated two Nobel Prize laureates. Fleming spent two years at this academy, but when he was 13, he got the opportunity to continue his studies in London. One of his older brothers, Tom, had moved to the city to study medicine and later opened up a university in London. Soon enough, four of his younger siblings, Alec included, joined him and lived together in London.
Fleming enrolled in the Royal Polytechnic Institution where, again, he impressed with his book learning and acumen. He was skipped ahead two years and finished school when he was just 16. From there he needed a job and found work with a shipping office. He spent four years at that place but later recalled that he did not enjoy the experience. In 1900, Alec found a much-needed break from the work he disliked by joining two of his brothers in the Second Boer War in South Africa. All were part of a volunteer infantry unit called the London Scottish Regiment.
However, they never actually saw any action before the war ended and mostly spent their time honing their shooting and swimming skills. By the time he returned to London, a stroke of good luck befell Fleming. In 1901, when he was 20 years old, he received an inheritance of roughly £250 from his uncle, John Fleming. He wasn't a vast fortune-seeker.
or anything, but it was enough for him to quit his 9-5 job and continue his studies. At the encouragement of his older brother, Tom, who now had a thriving medical practice, Fleming enrolled in med school. There's a myth, which is still popular today, which states that Fleming's education was paid for by the Churchill family because Fleming's father once saved Winston Churchill from drowning as a boy. In gratitude, Winston's father, Lord Randolph Churchill, promised to give young Alexander the same kind of education that his own son would receive. The story continued decades later, during World War II, when Churchill fell gravely ill due to pneumonia, but his life was saved once again by a Fleming thanks to the penicillin developed by Alexander.
This is quite a fanciful tale, and it most likely still persists today because it involves two popular, larger-than-life figures of their time. Unfortunately, though, there is no evidence to back it up, and Fleming himself dismissed this as nothing but a wondrous fable. There is nothing on the Churchill side to lend it credence either, and as you might suspect, the life of the Prime Minister has been extensively documented.
The simple truth is that Fleming obtained an inheritance, and because he had excellent scores in his examinations, he could more or less have his pick of college. He chose St. Mary's Hospital Medical School in Paddington because it was close to his home and because he once played water polo against their team. In 1906, he graduated from the school with distinction and began his career in medical research. This was not his original choice and, in fact, he made it through a strange set of circumstances.
At first, Fleming intended to become a surgeon. As it happened, due to his time in the Boer War, Alec was quite a skilled marksman and one of the top shooters on St. Mary's Rifle Club team. He was so valued, in fact, that the club captain did not want him to leave, which is what would have happened if Fleming had become a surgeon.
Instead, he convinced the Scotsman to pursue a career in research in St. Mary's and even got him a position working under Sir Elmrith Wright. That way, everybody was happy. The rifle club kept one of its top sharpshooters while Fleming got to study under one of the world's leading immunologists. Here, Fleming was exposed to Wright's ideas on vaccine therapies, which undoubtedly influenced his career. In 1908, he graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in bacteriology and became a lecturer at St. Mary's.
A few years later, Fleming developed a reputation as the go-to guy in London if you were rich and had syphilis. He began administering a new drug called Salvarsan, which today is known as osphenamine. It was created in the lab of German physician and Nobel Prize laureate Paul Ehrlich and Back then, it was the first effective treatment against syphilis.
Fleming was introduced to the drug by Wright and amassed a tidy sum of money by being one of the main proponents of Salfosan in England. Fleming's practice and his research progressed along smoothly until World War I broke out. He enlisted and served with the Royal Army Medical Corps as a captain. During his time there, he continued his research into bacteriology in a makeshift laboratory in Boulogne in France. He saw many soldiers die due to infected wounds and couldn't help but notice that the antiseptics they were using tended to make the injuries worse.
He studied this problem and wrote an article which was subsequently published in the medical journal The Lancet in 1917. Fleming argued that chemicals such as carbolic acid, which were used as antiseptic, were only efficient in certain cases such as treating surface cuts. When dealing with deeper wounds, the chemicals did more harm than good as they killed the body's own immunity agents, such as leukocytes, and also minimalized the body's ability to protect itself from infection. According to his observations, anaerobic bacteria thrived in deep wounds despite the presence of antiseptics.
Fleming opined that in such cases it was best to simply leave the wound clean, let it dry, and then let nature take its course. His beliefs were echoed by his mentor Sir Almuth Wright, who also argued that deep wounds should only be cleaned using a simple saline solution. But unfortunately, their recommendations were mostly ignored by field doctors for the rest of the war. now just before we get into the rest of today's video don't ignore this recommendation it's the holidays and we're all busy we've got plans to arrange gifts to give places to go but with today's sponsor brilliant you can give the gift of learning i bet there's someone you know who enjoys learning as much as you do and a subscription to brilliant could make a perfect gift for them you've heard me talk about brilliant before maybe you even have a membership yourself they teach you all about math science and computer science but beyond that they also teach you problem-solving skills which are practical even if you don't pursue the sciences learning how to break down complex problems to their component parts is pretty critical in whatever career path you choose but look really it's just a great way to take what you learn on channels like this one a step further or in this case you could gift a premium subscription to someone else so they can take their knowledge further it's the gift of learning and well is there a better gift than that do it right now at brilliant.org forward slash biographics or click the link below let's get back to it even though fleming is renowned for his discovery of penicillin he actually made a different breakthrough earlier in his career this one however did not end up having a huge impact on medicine so it tends to get left behind after he returned home from the war fleming continued his studies into substances with microbial properties and he made an interesting discovery while researching nasal mucus The exact circumstances are somewhat murky, as there are different versions of the story that have been repeated. Some say he obtained the mucus sample from a patient with a heavy cold.
Others say that Fleming himself was working while he had a cold and had a eureka moment and decided to investigate his own nasal drippings. Further, some also say that he simply got lucky and a bit of snot dripped down onto a petri dish when he was in the lab. Regardless of how it got there, Fleming wanted to see what effect the mucus would have on bacteria. He mixed the two together and let them sit for a few weeks.
When he came back to investigate, Fleming discovered that the nasal substance completely killed the bacterial colonies. Fleming realized that the secretion must have contained an antimicrobial component which was part of the human body's innate immune system. It was an enzyme which Fleming isolated and named lysozyme.
As he kept researching this new substance, he found that it was present in many other bodily secretions, including tears, saliva, skin, and hair. Subsequently, the bacteriologist discovered that lysozyme was also present in egg whites, which meant that huge quantities could be isolated with relative ease. This could have been a major boon for the field of immunology, but unfortunately, the enzyme was mostly effective against harmless, airborne bacteria, rather than anything actually dangerous.
Today, it's mostly used as a food and wine preservative. Even so, it showed Fleming the potential in this kind of research, and set him on track to make a discovery that would revolutionize medicine forever. Fleming once wrote, 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 the scientist was looking for a better alternative to lysozyme the latter showed itself worthy as a proof of concept but surely there had to be another substance out there somewhere which was more effective against dangerous bacteria to that end fleming had begun experimenting and studying the properties of a bacterium called staphylococcus a nasty piece of work that could cause abscesses sore throats and boils fortunately for fleming and the rest of the world the bacteriologist was not exactly a tidy man. In August 1928, he went on a family vacation with his first wife, a nurse named Sarah McElroy. In tow was their four-year-old boy, Robert. He grouped up all of his Petri dishes, which contained bacterial colonies, and left them near an open window in his lab. In some versions of the story, this carelessness was ascribed to one of his assistants, not to Fleming himself.
When the doctor returned on September 3, he noticed that one dish had been contaminated with mold spores. This annoyed him at first. Then he saw that there were no bacterial colonies near the mold.
The latter had killed all of the bacteria that it came into contact with and inhibited its growth. Fleming isolated the mold and identified it as a rare strain of Penicillin notatum. He gave his new creation the unfortunate name of Mold Juice and it wasn't until several months later that he decided that a rebranding might be in order and he came up with Penicillin. One appealing name aside, Fleming's Mold Juice immediately showed great potential. promise as it proved effective not only against staphylococcus, but other harmful bacteria such as meningococcus, streptococcus, and diphtheria bacillus.
The first antibiotic had been created, and the world now had a potential cure for pneumonia, gonorrhea, meningitis, scarlet fever, and other infectious diseases. Well, actually, not so fast. In reality, the process of taking penicillin and turning it from simple mold into a practical medicine was long and difficult. and involved a lot of work from many different scientists. Fleming's role is undeniable, but to give him sole credit for ushering in the era of antibiotics is doing a disservice to many other brilliant minds.
First off, let's talk about his precursors. Fleming was the first to isolate and identify the bacteria-killing mold and treat other people with it, but the phenomenon itself had been around for millennia. Ancient cultures like the Egyptians were noted for the practice of applying pulses made from moldy bread to wounds to prevent infections.
In modern times, an English physician named Sir John Burden Sanderson might have been the first to observe and report that certain molds from the Penicillium family could inhibit the growth of bacteria back in 1871. Inspired by his work, Joseph Lister, the father of antiseptic surgery, established a year later that Penicillin Glaucoma had the potential to kill off bacteria, but never published his findings. Many other scientists came before the Scottish doctor, but for whatever reasons, they were never able to take their own research to its conclusion. Even Fleming himself found it difficult, at first, to make others care about his discovery.
In 1928, he isolated the mold, he called it penicillin, and began treating people with it. In June the following year, Fleming published his findings in the British Journal of Experimental Pathology to a very lukewarm and uninterested reception. Back then, people could not yet see how antibiotics could change the medical world and this included fleming himself in the article he made few mentions regarding penicillin's potential medical applications and instead focused on how it could be used in a mixed culture to separate bacteria sensitive to the mold from bacteria that had no reaction to it he had two assistants stuart craddock and frederick ridley who were given the arduous task of finding ways to isolate pure penicillin from the fungus which produced it however the substance was unstable and they were only able to produce solutions of crude material.
For a while, it looked like manufacturing large quantities of penicillin would be nigh impossible. During the 1930s, Fleming continued his research on penicillin, but never made that breakthrough that would have turned it into the life-saving drug that we know today. The same problems remained all throughout the decade. The penicillin was too impure and could not be mass-produced.
That breakthrough did happen, eventually, but it came from a team at Oxford led by Australian pharmacologist Howard Florey. His group worked in a research department named the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology, better known simply as the Dunn School. They started their work on penicillin in 1939 with the main goal being to isolate and stabilize enough of it to be usable on humans. Besides Flory, some of the other key members of the Oxford team were German biochemist Ernst Chain, English biologist Norman Heatley, and English biochemist Edward Abraham. However, their program needed so much penicillin mold filtrate for animal experiments and clinical trials that soon enough, pretty much the entire Dunn School worked on the project, so we could never give full credit to everyone who played a part in developing the life-saving antibiotic.
Their efforts were also slowed down by another minor issue called World War II, so it wasn't likely they had any abundance of manpower and resources. In fact, to save on space and materials, they began growing bacteria cultures in whatever vessels they had on hand, like bathtubs, food tins, and even bedpans. Edward Abraham correctly deduced the structure of penicillin at roughly the same time as American chemist Robert Burns Woodward.
Norman Hartley suggested that larger volumes of penicillin could be produced by extracting it into amyl acetate and then back into water chain and foley discovered how to isolate and concentrate the germ-killing agent found in penicillin in 1940 the team used penicillin to protect mice from streptococcus a year later a policeman named albert alexander became the first human to receive the oxford penicillin in order to treat a bad infection that he had inside his mouth although alexander made a quick recovery in just a few days they didn't have enough of the drug to deal with the infection completely and it returned in a few days and killed him not an auspicious start but Subsequent patients fared better and showed the world the value of penicillin as medicine. The challenge of scaling up production of the drug to industrial quantities was eventually taken up by British and American pharmaceutical companies, particularly the Northern Regional Research Laboratory in Illinois, a subsidiary of the United States Department of Agriculture. As you can see, there were many individuals and institutions that played a vital role in the development of penicillin as an antibiotic. For their work, they were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1945, although it only recognized Alexander Fleming, Howard Florey, and Ernst Chain, due to one of the Foundation's most controversial rules of awarding a Nobel Prize, and that's that it must be a maximum of three people named.
Fleming spent his entire professional career as a researcher at St. Mary's, and in 1946 he succeeded his mentor Amrith Wright as head of the hospital's inoculation department, which was renamed to the Wright-Fleming Institute. He also served as president of the Society for General Microbiology, rector of Edinburgh University, a member of the Pontifical Academy of Science, and even as honorary chief of a Native American tribe. In addition to these, Fleming pretty much received every other honorary medal and doctorate under the sun.
For his part, Fleming always made sure to acknowledge the efforts of Florey and his team in making penicillin a worldwide commodity, but the general public and the media seemed determined to lavished their praise solely on the Scottish microbiologist, probably because the story of his happy accident was just more enjoyable. In his later years, Fleming concentrated his efforts on warning people about a problem that we face right now, and that's resistance to antibiotics. Both he and Ameth Wright realized early on that microbes could very easily become resistant to penicillin if the wrong doses were used, or for too short a period. Each subsequent generation of microorganisms was also more resistant than the last.
He wrote several papers on the matter and even mentioned it during his speech for the Nobel Prize. In his private life, Fleming was quiet and unassuming. His son, Robert, followed in his father's footsteps, studying medicine and becoming a general practitioner. His first wife, Sarah, passed away in 1949 and, unsurprisingly, this had a profound effect on Fleming, who buried himself in his work and spent a lot of time alone in his laboratory until the late hours of the night.
Fleming's life brightened up considerably when he met Dr. Amelia Koutsoury-Varekos, who came to work at St. Mary's. The two fell in love and married in 1953, but their happiness was short-lived. Alexander Fleming died suddenly two years later, on March 11, 1955, of coronary thrombosis. He had been feeling poorly over the last few weeks, but was convinced that it was only gastric distress. When he started feeling nauseous on the day of his death, his wife wanted to call a doctor, but he insisted that that wasn't necessary.
He had a heart attack minutes later. was subsequently buried at St. Paul's Cathedral. Alexander Fleming's life may have been extinguished in a matter of moments, but he left behind a life-saving legacy that will live on forever, one that few people in history could ever hope to match.