Sir Alexander Fleming FRS FRSE FRCS
Fleming in his laboratory, c. 1943
Born	(1881-08-06)6 August 1881 Darvel, Ayrshire, Scotland
Died	11 March 1955(1955-03-11) (aged 73) London, England
Resting place	St Paul's Cathedral
Alma mater	Royal Polytechnic Institution St Mary's Hospital Medical School
Known for	Discovery of penicillin and lysozyme
Spouses	Sarah Marion McElroy (m. 1915; died 1949) Amalia Koutsouri-Vourekas (m. 1953)
Awards	Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (1945)^[1] Cameron Prize for Therapeutics of the University of Edinburgh (1945) Actonian Prize (1949)
Scientific career
Fields	Bacteriology immunology
Institutions	St Mary's Hospital, London

Signature

Sir Alexander Fleming FRS FRSE FRCS^[2] (6 August 1881 – 11 March 1955) was a Scottish physician and microbiologist, best known for discovering the world's first broadly effective antibiotic substance, which he named penicillin. His discovery in 1928 of what was later named benzylpenicillin (or penicillin G) from the mould Penicillium rubens has been described as the "single greatest victory ever achieved over disease".^[3]^[4] For this discovery, he shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1945 with Howard Florey and Ernst Chain.^[5]^[6]^[7]

He also discovered the enzyme lysozyme from his nasal discharge in 1922, and along with it a bacterium he named Micrococcus lysodeikticus, later renamed Micrococcus luteus.

Fleming was knighted for his scientific achievements in 1944.^[8] In 1999, he was named in Time magazine's list of the 100 Most Important People of the 20th century. In 2002, he was chosen in the BBC's television poll for determining the 100 Greatest Britons, and in 2009, he was also voted third "greatest Scot" in an opinion poll conducted by STV, behind only Robert Burns and William Wallace.

Early life and education

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Born on 6 August 1881 at Lochfield farm near Darvel, in Ayrshire, Scotland, Alexander Fleming was the third of four children of farmer Hugh Fleming and Grace Stirling Morton, the daughter of a neighbouring farmer. Hugh Fleming had four surviving children from his first marriage. He was 59 at the time of his second marriage to Grace, and died when Alexander was seven.^[9]

Fleming went to Loudoun Moor School and Darvel School, and earned a two-year scholarship to Kilmarnock Academy before moving to London, where he attended the Royal Polytechnic Institution.^[10] After working in a shipping office for four years, the twenty-year-old Alexander Fleming inherited some money from an uncle, John Fleming. His elder brother, Tom, was already a physician and suggested to him that he should follow the same career, and so in 1903, the younger Alexander enrolled at St Mary's Hospital Medical School in Paddington (now part of Imperial College London); he qualified with an MBBS degree from the school with distinction in 1906.^[9]

Fleming, who was a private in the London Scottish Regiment of the Volunteer Force from 1900^[5] to 1914,^[11] had been a member of the rifle club at the medical school. The captain of the club, wishing to retain Fleming in the team, suggested that he join the research department at St Mary's, where he became assistant bacteriologist to Sir Almroth Wright, a pioneer in vaccine therapy and immunology. In 1908, he gained a BSc degree with gold medal in bacteriology, and became a lecturer at St Mary's until 1914.

Commissioned lieutenant in 1914 and promoted captain in 1917,^[11] Fleming served throughout World War I in the Royal Army Medical Corps, and was Mentioned in Dispatches. He and many of his colleagues worked in battlefield hospitals at the Western Front in France.

In 1918 he returned to St Mary's Hospital, where he was elected Professor of Bacteriology of the University of London in 1928. In 1951 he was elected the Rector of the University of Edinburgh for a term of three years.^[9]

Scientific contributions

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Antiseptics

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During World War I, Fleming with Leonard Colebrook and Sir Almroth Wright joined the war efforts and practically moved the entire Inoculation Department of St Mary's to the British military hospital at Boulogne-sur-Mer. Serving as a temporary lieutenant of the Royal Army Medical Corps, he witnessed the death of many soldiers from sepsis resulting from infected wounds. Antiseptics, which were used at the time to treat infected wounds, he observed, often worsened the injuries.^[12] In an article published in the medical journal The Lancet in 1917, he described an ingenious experiment, which he was able to conduct as a result of his own glassblowing skills, in which he explained why antiseptics were killing more soldiers than infection itself during the war. Antiseptics worked well on the surface, but deep wounds tended to shelter anaerobic bacteria from the antiseptic agent, and antiseptics seemed to remove beneficial agents produced that protected the patients in these cases at least as well as they removed bacteria, and did nothing to remove the bacteria that were out of reach.^[13] Wright strongly supported Fleming's findings, but despite this, most army physicians over the course of the war continued to use antiseptics even in cases where this worsened the condition of the patients.^[9]

Discovery of lysozyme

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At St Mary's Hospital, Fleming continued his investigations into bacteria culture and antibacterial substances. As his research scholar at the time V. D. Allison recalled, Fleming was not a tidy researcher and usually expected unusual bacterial growths in his culture plates. Fleming had teased Allison of his "excessive tidiness in the laboratory", and Allison rightly attributed such untidiness as the success of Fleming's experiments, and said, "[If] he had been as tidy as he thought I was, he would not have made his two great discoveries."^[14]

In late 1921, while Fleming was maintaining agar plates for bacteria, he found that one of the plates was contaminated with bacteria from the air. When he added nasal mucus, he found that the mucus inhibited the bacterial growth.^[15] Surrounding the mucus area was a clear transparent circle (1 cm from the mucus), indicating the killing zone of bacteria, followed by a glassy and translucent ring beyond which was an opaque area indicating normal bacterial growth. In the next test, he used bacteria maintained in saline that formed a yellow suspension. Within two minutes of adding fresh mucus, the yellow saline turned completely clear. He extended his tests using tears, which were contributed by his co-workers. As Allison reminisced, saying, "For the next five or six weeks, our tears were the source of supply for this extraordinary phenomenon. Many were the lemons we used (after the failure of onions) to produce a flow of tears... The demand by us for tears was so great, that laboratory attendants were pressed into service, receiving threepence for each contribution."^[14]

His further tests with sputum, cartilage, blood, semen, ovarian cyst fluid, pus, and egg white showed that the bactericidal agent was present in all of these.^[16] He reported his discovery before the Medical Research Club in December and before the Royal Society the next year but failed to stir any interest, as Allison recollected:

I was present at this [Medical Research Club] meeting as Fleming's guest. His paper describing his discovery was received with no questions asked and no discussion, which was most unusual and an indication that it was considered to be of no importance. The following year he read a paper on the subject before the Royal Society, Burlington House, Piccadilly and he and I gave a demonstration of our work. Again with one exception little comment or attention was paid to it.^[14]

Reporting in the 1 May 1922 issue of the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences under the title "On a remarkable bacteriolytic element found in tissues and secretions", Fleming wrote:

In this communication I wish to draw attention to a substance present in the tissues and secretions of the body, which is capable of rapidly dissolving certain bacteria. As this substance has properties akin to those of ferments I have called it a "Lysozyme", and shall refer to it by this name throughout the communication. The lysozyme was first noticed during some investigations made on a patient suffering from acute coryza.^[15]

This was the first recorded discovery of lysozyme. With Allison, he published further studies on lysozyme in October issue of the British Journal of Experimental Pathology the same year.^[17] Although he was able to obtain larger amounts of lysozyme from egg whites, the enzyme was only effective against small counts of harmless bacteria, and therefore had little therapeutic potential. This indicates one of the major differences between pathogenic and harmless bacteria.^[12] Described in the original publication, "a patient suffering from acute coryza"^[15] was later identified as Fleming himself. His research notebook dated 21 November 1921 showed a sketch of the culture plate with a small note: "Staphyloid coccus from A.F.'s nose."^[16] He also identified the bacterium present in the nasal mucus as Micrococcus Lysodeikticus, giving the species name (meaning "lysis indicator" for its susceptibility to lysozymal activity).^[18] The species was reassigned as Micrococcus luteus in 1972.^[19] The "Fleming strain" (NCTC2665) of this bacterium has become a model in different biological studies.^[20]^[21] The importance of lysozyme was not recognised, and Fleming was well aware of this, in his presidential address at the Royal Society of Medicine meeting on 18 October 1932, he said:

I choose lysozyme as the subject for this address for two reasons, firstly because I have a fatherly interest in the name, and, secondly, because its importance in connection with natural immunity does not seem to be generally appreciated.^[22]

In his Nobel lecture on 11 December 1945, he briefly mentioned lysozyme, saying, "Penicillin was not the first antibiotic I happened to discover."^[23] It was only towards the end of the 20th century that the true importance of Fleming's discovery in immunology was realised as lysozyme became the first antimicrobial protein discovered that constitute part of our innate immunity.^[24]^[25]

Discovery of penicillin

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An advertisement advertising penicillin's "miracle cure"

One sometimes finds what one is not looking for. 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.
— Alexander Fleming^[26]

Experiment

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By 1927, Fleming had been investigating the properties of staphylococci. He was already well known from his earlier work, and had developed a reputation as a brilliant researcher. In 1928, he studied the variation of Staphylococcus aureus grown under natural condition, after the work of Joseph Warwick Bigger, who discovered that the bacterium could grow into a variety of types (strains).^[27] On 3 September 1928, Fleming returned to his laboratory having spent a holiday with his family at Suffolk. Before leaving for his holiday, he inoculated staphylococci on culture plates and left them on a bench in a corner of his laboratory.^[16] On his return, Fleming noticed that one culture was contaminated with a fungus, and that the colonies of staphylococci immediately surrounding the fungus had been destroyed, whereas other staphylococci colonies farther away were normal, famously remarking "That's funny".^[28] Fleming showed the contaminated culture to his former assistant Merlin Pryce, who reminded him, "That's how you discovered lysozyme."^[29]^{[page needed]} He identified the mould as being from the genus Penicillium. He suspected it to be P. chrysogenum, but a colleague Charles J. La Touche identified it as P. rubrum. (It was later corrected as P. notatum and then officially accepted as P. chrysogenum; in 2011, it was resolved as P. rubens.)^[30]^[31]

The laboratory in which Fleming discovered and tested penicillin is preserved as the Alexander Fleming Laboratory Museum in St. Mary's Hospital, Paddington. The source of the fungal contaminant was established in 1966 as coming from La Touche's room, which was directly below Fleming's.^[32]^[33]

Fleming grew the mould in a pure culture and found that the culture broth contained an antibacterial substance. He investigated its anti-bacterial effect on many organisms, and noticed that it affected bacteria such as staphylococci and many other Gram-positive pathogens that cause scarlet fever, pneumonia, meningitis and diphtheria, but not typhoid fever or paratyphoid fever, which are caused by Gram-negative bacteria, for which he was seeking a cure at the time. It also affected Neisseria gonorrhoeae, which causes gonorrhoea, although this bacterium is Gram-negative. After some months of calling it "mould juice" or "the inhibitor", he gave the name penicillin on 7 March 1929 for the antibacterial substance present in the mould.^[34]

Reception and publication

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Fleming presented his discovery on 13 February 1929 before the Medical Research Club. His talk on "A medium for the isolation of Pfeiffer's bacillus" did not receive any particular attention or comment. Henry Dale, the then Director of National Institute for Medical Research and chair of the meeting, much later reminisced that he did not even sense any striking point of importance in Fleming's speech.^[16] Fleming published his discovery in 1929 in the British Journal of Experimental Pathology,^[35] but little attention was paid to the article. His problem was the difficulty of producing penicillin in large amounts, and moreover, isolation of the main compound. Even with the help of Harold Raistrick and his team of biochemists at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, chemical purification was futile. "As a result, penicillin languished largely forgotten in the 1930s", as Milton Wainwright described.^[36]

As late as in 1936, there was no appreciation for penicillin. When Fleming talked of its medical importance at the Second International Congress of Microbiology held in London,^[37]^[38] no one believed him. As Allison, his companion in both the Medical Research Club and international congress meeting, remarked the two occasions:

[Fleming at the Medical Research Club meeting] suggested the possible value of penicillin for the treatment of infection in man. Again there was a total lack of interest and no discussion. Fleming was keenly disappointed, but worse was to follow. He read a paper on his work on penicillin at a meeting of the International Congress of Microbiology, attended by the foremost bacteriologists from all over the world. There was no support for his views on its possible future value for the prevention and treatment of human infections and discussion was minimal. Fleming bore these disappointments stoically, but they did not alter his views or deter him from continuing his investigation of penicillin.^[14]

In 1941, the British Medical Journal reported that "[Penicillin] does not appear to have been considered as possibly useful from any other point of view."^[39]^[40]^[32]

Purification and stabilisation

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In Oxford, Ernst Chain and Edward Abraham were studying the molecular structure of the antibiotic. Abraham was the first to propose the correct structure of penicillin.^[41]^[42] Shortly after the team published its first results in 1940, Fleming telephoned Howard Florey, Chain's head of department, to say that he would be visiting within the next few days. When Chain heard that Fleming was coming, he remarked "Good God! I thought he was dead."^[43]

Norman Heatley suggested transferring the active ingredient of penicillin back into water by changing its acidity. This produced enough of the drug to begin testing on animals. There were many more people involved in the Oxford team, and at one point the entire Sir William Dunn School of Pathology was involved in its production. After the team had developed a method of purifying penicillin to an effective first stable form in 1940, several clinical trials ensued, and their amazing success inspired the team to develop methods for mass production and mass distribution in 1945.^[44]^[45]

Fleming was modest about his part in the development of penicillin, describing his fame as the "Fleming Myth" and he praised Florey and Chain for transforming the laboratory curiosity into a practical drug. Fleming was the first to discover the properties of the active substance, giving him the privilege of naming it: penicillin. He also kept, grew, and distributed the original mould for twelve years, and continued until 1940 to try to get help from any chemist who had enough skill to make penicillin. Sir Henry Harris summed up the process in 1998 as: "Without Fleming, no Chain; without Chain, no Florey; without Florey, no Heatley; without Heatley, no penicillin."^[46] The discovery of penicillin and its subsequent development as a prescription drug mark the start of modern antibiotics.^[47]

Medical use and mass production

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In his first clinical trial, Fleming treated his research scholar Stuart Craddock who had developed severe infection of the nasal antrum (sinusitis). The treatment started on 9 January 1929 but without any effect. It probably was due to the fact that the infection was with influenza bacillus (Haemophilus influenzae), the bacterium which he had found unsusceptible to penicillin.^[32] Fleming gave some of his original penicillin samples to his colleague-surgeon Arthur Dickson Wright for clinical test in 1928.^[48]^[49] Although Wright reportedly said that it "seemed to work satisfactorily",^[50] there are no records of its specific use. Cecil George Paine, a pathologist at the Royal Infirmary in Sheffield and former student of Fleming, was the first to use penicillin successfully for medical treatment.^[36] He cured eye infections (conjunctivitis) of one adult and three infants (neonatal conjunctivitis) on 25 November 1930.^[51]

Fleming also successfully treated severe conjunctivitis in 1932.^[3]^[52]^[53] Keith Bernard Rogers, who had joined St Mary's as medical student in 1929,^[54] was captain of the London University rifle team and was about to participate in an inter-hospital rifle shooting competition when he developed conjunctivitis.^[55]^[56]^[57] Fleming applied his penicillin and cured Rogers before the competition.^[3]^[52]^[58] It is said that the "penicillin worked and the match was won." However, the report that "Keith was probably the first patient to be treated clinically with penicillin ointment"^[56] is no longer true as Paine's medical records showed up.^[34]

There is a popular assertion both in popular and scientific literature that Fleming largely abandoned penicillin work in the early 1930s.^[59]^[60]^[61]^[62] In his review of André Maurois's The Life of Sir Alexander Fleming, Discoverer of Penicillin, William L. Kissick went so far as to say that "Fleming had abandoned penicillin in 1932... Although the recipient of many honors and the author of much scientific work, Sir Alexander Fleming does not appear to be an ideal subject for a biography."^[63] This is false, as Fleming continued to pursue penicillin research.^[49]^[64] As late as in 1939, Fleming's notebook shows attempts to make better penicillin production using different media.^[34] In 1941, he published a method for assessment of penicillin effectiveness.^[65] As to the chemical isolation and purification, Howard Florey and Ernst Chain at the Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford took up the research to mass-produce it, which they achieved with support from World War II military projects under the British and US governments.^[66]

By mid-1942, the Oxford team produced the pure penicillin compound as yellow powder.^[67] In August 1942, Harry Lambert (an associate of Fleming's brother Robert) was admitted to St Mary's Hospital due to a life-threatening infection of the nervous system (streptococcal meningitis).^[4] Fleming treated him with sulphonamides, but Lambert's condition deteriorated. He tested the antibiotic susceptibility and found that his penicillin could kill the bacteria. He requested Florey for the isolated sample. Florey sent the incompletely purified sample, which Fleming immediately administered into Lambert's spinal canal. Lambert showed signs of improvement the very next day,^[14] and completely recovered within a week.^[3]^[68] Fleming published the clinical case in The Lancet in 1943.^[69]

Upon this medical breakthrough, Allison informed the British Ministry of Health of the importance of penicillin and the need for mass production. The War Cabinet was convinced of the usefulness upon which Sir Cecil Weir, Director General of Equipment, called for a meeting on the mode of action on 28 September 1942.^[70]^[71] The Penicillin Committee was created on 5 April 1943. The committee consisted of Weir as chairman, Fleming, Florey, Sir Percival Hartley, Allison and representatives from pharmaceutical companies as members. The main goals were to produce penicillin rapidly in large quantities with collaboration of American companies, and to supply the drug exclusively for Allied armed forces.^[14] By D-Day in 1944, enough penicillin had been produced to treat all the wounded of the Allied troops.^[72]

Antibiotic resistance

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Fleming also discovered very early that bacteria developed antibiotic resistance whenever too little penicillin was used or when it was used for too short a period. Almroth Wright had predicted antibiotic resistance even before it was noticed during experiments. Fleming cautioned about the use of penicillin in his many speeches around the world. On 26 June 1945, he made the following cautionary statements: "the microbes are educated to resist penicillin and a host of penicillin-fast organisms is bred out ... In such cases the thoughtless person playing with penicillin is morally responsible for the death of the man who finally succumbs to infection with the penicillin-resistant organism. I hope this evil can be averted."^[73] He cautioned not to use penicillin unless there was a properly diagnosed reason for it to be used, and that if it were used, never to use too little, or for too short a period, since these are the circumstances under which bacterial resistance to antibiotics develops.^[74]

It had been experimentally shown in 1942 that S. aureus could develop penicillin resistance under prolonged exposure.^[75] Elaborating the possibility of penicillin resistance in clinical conditions in his Nobel Lecture, Fleming said:

The time may come when penicillin can be bought by anyone in the shops. Then there is the danger that the ignorant man may easily underdose himself and by exposing his microbes to non-lethal quantities of the drug make them resistant.^[23]

It was around that time that the first clinical case of penicillin resistance was reported.^[76]

Personal life

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On 24 December 1915, Fleming married a trained nurse, Sarah Marion McElroy of Killala, County Mayo, Ireland. Their only child, Robert Fleming (1924–2015), became a general medical practitioner. After his first wife's death in 1949, Fleming married Amalia Koutsouri-Vourekas, a Greek colleague at St. Mary's, on 9 April 1953; she died in 1986.^[77]

Fleming came from a Presbyterian background, while his first wife Sarah was a (lapsed) Roman Catholic. It is said that he was not particularly religious, and their son Robert was later received into the Anglican church, while still reportedly inheriting his two parents' fairly irreligious disposition.^[78]

When Fleming learned of Robert D. Coghill and Andrew J. Moyer patenting the method of penicillin production in the United States in 1944,^[79] he was furious, and commented:

I found penicillin and have given it free for the benefit of humanity. Why should it become a profit-making monopoly of manufacturers in another country?^[14]

From 1921 until his death in 1955, Fleming owned a country home named "The Dhoon" in Barton Mills, Suffolk.^[4]^[80]

Death

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On 11 March 1955, Fleming died at his home in London of a heart attack. His ashes are buried in St Paul's Cathedral.^[1]

Awards and legacy

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Display of Fleming's awards, including his Nobel Prize. Also shows a sample of penicillin and an example of an early apparatus for preparing it.

Fleming's discovery of penicillin changed the world of modern medicine by introducing the age of useful antibiotics; penicillin has saved, and is still saving, millions of people around the world.^[81]

The laboratory at St Mary's Hospital where Fleming discovered penicillin is home to the Fleming Museum, a popular London attraction. His alma mater, St Mary's Hospital Medical School, merged with Imperial College London in 1988. The Sir Alexander Fleming Building on the South Kensington campus was opened in 1998, where his son Robert and his great-granddaughter Claire were presented to the Queen; it is now one of the main preclinical teaching sites of the Imperial College School of Medicine.

His other alma mater, the Royal Polytechnic Institution (now the University of Westminster) has named one of its student halls of residence Alexander Fleming House, which is near to Old Street.

Fleming, Florey and Chain jointly received the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1945. According to the rules of the Nobel committee, a maximum of three people may share the prize. Fleming's Nobel Prize medal was acquired by the National Museums of Scotland in 1989 and is on display after the museum re-opened in 2011.^[82]
He was a member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.^[5]
He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1943.^[2]
He was awarded the Hunterian Professorship by the Royal College of Surgeons of England.
He was knighted as a Knight Bachelor by King George VI in 1944.^[83]^[84]
He was awarded the Medal for Merit by the President of the United States.^[11]
He was made a Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour by the French Republic.^[11]
He was made a Grand Cross of the Order of the Phoenix of Greece.^[11]
He was made a Knight Grand Cross of the Order of Alfonso X the Wise (Spain) in 1948.^[85]
In 1999, Time magazine named Fleming one of the 100 Most Important People of the 20th century, stating:
It was a discovery that would change the course of history. The active ingredient in that mould, which Fleming named penicillin, turned out to be an infection-fighting agent of enormous potency. When it was finally recognized for what it was, the most efficacious life-saving drug in the world, penicillin would alter forever the treatment of bacterial infections. By the middle of the century, Fleming's discovery had spawned a huge pharmaceutical industry, churning out synthetic penicillins that would conquer some of mankind's most ancient scourges, including syphilis, gangrene and tuberculosis.^[86]
The importance of his work was recognized by the placement of an International Historic Chemical Landmark plaque at the Alexander Fleming Laboratory Museum in London on 19 November 1999.^[87]
When 2000 was approaching, at least three large Swedish magazines ranked penicillin as the most important discovery of the millennium.
In 2002, Fleming was named in the BBC's list of the 100 Greatest Britons following a nationwide vote.^[88]
A statue of him stands outside the main bullring in Madrid, Plaza de Toros de Las Ventas.^[89] It was erected by subscription from grateful matadors, as penicillin greatly reduced the number of deaths in the bullring.^[89]
Flemingovo náměstí is a square named after Fleming in the university area of the Dejvice community in Prague.
A secondary school is named after him in Sofia, Bulgaria.
In Athens, a small square in the downtown district of Votanikos is named after Fleming and bears his bust. There are also a number of streets in greater Athens and other towns in Greece named after either Fleming or his Greek second wife Amalia.
In mid-2009, he was commemorated on a new series of banknotes issued by the Clydesdale Bank; his image appears on the new issue of £5 notes.^[90]
In 2009, Fleming was voted third greatest Scot in an opinion poll conducted by STV, behind only Scotland's national poet Robert Burns and national hero William Wallace.^[91]
91006 Fleming, an asteroid in the Asteroid Belt, is named after him.
Fleming metro station, on the Thessaloniki Metro system, takes its name from Fleming Street on which it is located.
Sir Alexander Fleming College, a British school in Trujillo, northern Peru
He and Howard Florey were jointly awarded the Cameron Prize for Therapeutics of the University of Edinburgh in 1945.
Rue Alexander Fleming in the borough of Saint-Laurent in Montreal is named in his honour.
The Fleming crater on the moon is named after him and the Scottish astronomer Williamina Fleming.
Mount Fleming in New Zealand's Paparoa Range was named after him in 1970 by the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research.^[92]
Biomedical Sciences Research Center "Alexander Fleming", a research organization in Greece established in the vision of his wife Amalia Fleming.
In March 2025, a gable-end mural featuring a portrait of Fleming was unveiled in the centre of Darvel. It is the work of Glasgow-based artist Rogue One.^[93]

Myths

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The Fleming myth

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By 1942, penicillin, produced as pure compound, was still in short supply and not available for clinical use. When Fleming used the first few samples prepared by the Oxford team to treat Harry Lambert who had streptococcal meningitis,^[3] the successful treatment was major news, particularly popularised in The Times. Wright was surprised to discover that Fleming and the Oxford team had not been mentioned, though Oxford was attributed as the source of the drug. Wright wrote to the editor of The Times, which eagerly interviewed Fleming, but Florey prohibited the Oxford team from seeking media coverage. As a consequence, only Fleming was widely publicised in the media,^[94] which led to the misconception that he was entirely responsible for the discovery and development of the drug.^[95] Fleming himself referred to this incident as "the Fleming myth."^[96]^[97]

The Churchills

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The popular story^[98] of Winston Churchill's father paying for Fleming's education after Fleming's father saved young Winston from death is false.^[95] According to the biography, Penicillin Man: Alexander Fleming and the Antibiotic Revolution by Kevin Brown, Alexander Fleming, in a letter^[99] to his friend and colleague Andre Gratia,^[100] described this as "A wondrous fable." Nor did he save Winston Churchill himself during World War II. Churchill was saved by Lord Moran, using sulphonamides, since he had no experience with penicillin, when Churchill fell ill in Carthage in Tunisia in 1943.^[101] The Daily Telegraph and The Morning Post on 21 December 1943 wrote that he had been saved by penicillin. He was saved by the new sulphonamide drug sulphapyridine, known at the time under the research code M&B 693, discovered and produced by May & Baker Ltd, Dagenham, Essex – a subsidiary of the French group Rhône-Poulenc. In a subsequent radio broadcast, Churchill referred to the new drug as "This admirable M&B".^[101]^[102]

See also

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References

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^ ^a ^b "Sir Alexander Fleming – Biography". Nobel Foundation. Retrieved 25 October 2011.
^ ^a ^b Colebrook, L. (1956). "Alexander Fleming 1881–1955". Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society. 2: 117–126. doi:10.1098/rsbm.1956.0008. JSTOR 769479. S2CID 71887808.
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e Bennett, Joan W.; Chung, King-Thom (2001). "Alexander Fleming and the discovery of penicillin". Advances in Applied Microbiology. 49. Elsevier: 163–184. doi:10.1016/s0065-2164(01)49013-7. ISBN 978-0-12-002649-4. PMID 11757350. Retrieved 17 October 2020.
^ ^a ^b ^c Ligon, B. Lee (2004). "Sir Alexander Fleming: Scottish researcher who discovered penicillin". Seminars in Pediatric Infectious Diseases. 15 (1): 58–64. doi:10.1053/j.spid.2004.02.002. PMID 15175996.
^ ^a ^b ^c "Alexander Fleming Biography". Les Prix Nobel. The Nobel Foundation. 1945. Archived from the original on 30 January 2011. Retrieved 27 March 2011.
^ Hugh, T. B. (2002). "Howard Florey, Alexander Fleming and the fairy tale of penicillin". The Medical Journal of Australia. 177 (1): 52–53. doi:10.5694/j.1326-5377.2002.tb04643.x. PMID 12436980. S2CID 222048204.
^ Cruickshank, Robert (1955). "Sir Alexander Fleming, F.R.S." Nature. 175 (4459): 355–356. Bibcode:1955Natur.175..663C. doi:10.1038/175663a0. PMC 1023893. PMID 13271592.
^ McIntyre, N. (2007). "Sir Alexander Fleming". Journal of Medical Biography. 15 (4): 234. doi:10.1258/j.jmb.2007.05-72. PMID 18615899. S2CID 77187550.
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d Mazumdar, P. M. (1984). "Fleming as Bacteriologist: Alexander Fleming". Science. 225 (4667): 1140–1141. Bibcode:1984Sci...225.1140C. doi:10.1126/science.225.4667.1140. PMID 17782415.
^ Brown, Kevin (2004). Penicillin man : Alexander Fleming and the antibiotic revolution. Stroud: Sutton. ISBN 978-0-7509-3152-6. Retrieved 11 September 2015.
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e Kelly's Handbook to the Titled, Landed and Official Classes. Kelly's. 1955. p. 802.
^ ^a ^b Tan, S. Y.; Tatsumura, Y. (July 2015). "Alexander Fleming (1881–1955): Discoverer of penicillin". Singapore Medical Journal. 56 (7): 366–367. doi:10.11622/smedj.2015105. PMC 4520913. PMID 26243971.
^ Fleming, Alexander (September 1917). "The Physiological and Antiseptic Action of Flavine (With Some Observations on the Testing of Antiseptics)". The Lancet. 190 (4905): 341–345. doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(01)52126-1.
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e ^f ^g Allison, V. D. (1974). "Personal recollections of Sir Almroth Wright and Sir Alexander Fleming". The Ulster Medical Journal. 43 (2): 89–98. PMC 2385475. PMID 4612919.
^ ^a ^b ^c Fleming, A. (1922). "On a remarkable bacteriolytic element found in tissues and secretions". Proceedings of the Royal Society B. 93 (653): 306–317. Bibcode:1922RSPSB..93..306F. doi:10.1098/rspb.1922.0023.
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d Lalchhandama, Kholhring (2020). "Reappraising Fleming's snot and mould". Science Vision. 20 (1): 29–42. doi:10.33493/scivis.20.01.03.
^ Fleming, Alexander; Allison, V. D. (1922). "Observations on a Bacteriolytic Substance ("Lysozyme") Found in Secretions and Tissues". British Journal of Experimental Pathology. 3 (5): 252–260. PMC 2047739.
^ Salton, M. R. J. (1957). "The properties of lysozyme and its action on micororganisms". Bacteriological Reviews. 21 (2): 82–100. doi:10.1128/MMBR.21.2.82-100.1957. PMC 180888. PMID 13436356.
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^ in October 1943 Abraham proposed a molecular structure which included a cyclic formation containing three carbon atoms and one nitrogen atom, the β-lactam ring, not then known in natural products. This structure was not immediately published due to the restrictions of wartime secrecy, and was initially strongly disputed, by Sir Robert Robinson among others, but it was finally confirmed in 1945 by Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin using X-ray analysis." Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; "Abraham, Sir Edward Penley"
^ Lowe, Gordon (13 May 1999). "Obituary: Sir Edward Abraham". The Independent. London. Archived from the original on 4 October 2013.
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^ Roberts, Michael; Ingram, Neil (2001). Biology (2nd, illustrated ed.). Nelson Thornes. p. 105. ISBN 0-7487-6238-8. Retrieved 4 March 2012. Penicillin is just one of a very large number of drugs which today are used by doctors to treat people with diseases.
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^ ^a ^b Lewine, Edward (2007). Death and the Sun: A Matador's Season in the Heart of Spain. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. p. 123.
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^ e.g., The Philadelphia Inquirer, 17 July 1945: Brown, Penicillin Man, note 43 to Chapter 2
^ 14 November 1945; British Library Additional Manuscripts 56115: Brown, Penicillin Man, note 44 to Chapter 2
^ see Wikipedia Discovery of penicillin article entry for 1920
^ ^a ^b Lesch JE (2007). "Chapter 7: M&B 693". The first miracle drugs: how the sulfa drugs transformed medicine (PDF). Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 158–159. ISBN 978-0-19-518775-5. Archived from the original (PDF) on 21 July 2019.
^ A History of May & Baker 1834–1984, Alden Press 1984.^{[ISBN missing]}

Further reading

[edit]

The Life Of Sir Alexander Fleming, Jonathan Cape, 1959. Maurois, André.
Nobel Lectures, the Physiology or Medicine 1942–1962, Elsevier Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 1964
An Outline History of Medicine. London: Butterworths, 1985. Rhodes, Philip.
The Cambridge Illustrated History of Medicine. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Porter, Roy, ed.
Penicillin Man: Alexander Fleming and the Antibiotic Revolution, Stroud, Sutton, 2004. Brown, Kevin.
Alexander Fleming: The Man and the Myth, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1984. Macfarlane, Gwyn
Fleming, Discoverer of Penicillin, Ludovici, Laurence J., 1952
The Penicillin Man: the Story of Sir Alexander Fleming, Lutterworth Press, 1957, Rowland, John.

External links

[edit]

Wikiquote has quotations related to Alexander Fleming.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Alexander Fleming.

Alexander Fleming Obituary
Alexander Fleming on Nobelprize.org including the Nobel Lecture, 11 December 1945 Penicillin
Some places and memories related to Alexander Fleming
Newspaper clippings about Alexander Fleming in the 20th Century Press Archives of the ZBW

Academic offices
Preceded by Alastair Sim	Rector of the University of Edinburgh 1951–1954	Succeeded by Sydney Smith

v t e Laureates of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
1901–1925	1901: Emil Behring 1902: Ronald Ross 1903: Niels Finsen 1904: Ivan Pavlov 1905: Robert Koch 1906: Camillo Golgi / Santiago Ramón y Cajal 1907: Alphonse Laveran 1908: Élie Metchnikoff / Paul Ehrlich 1909: Emil Kocher 1910: Albrecht Kossel 1911: Allvar Gullstrand 1912: Alexis Carrel 1913: Charles Richet 1914: Róbert Bárány 1915 1916 1917 1918 1919: Jules Bordet 1920: August Krogh 1921 1922: Archibald Hill / Otto Meyerhof 1923: Frederick Banting / John Macleod 1924: Willem Einthoven 1925
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1951–1975	1951: Max Theiler 1952: Selman Waksman 1953: Hans Krebs / Fritz Lipmann 1954: John Enders / Thomas Weller / Frederick Robbins 1955: Hugo Theorell 1956: André Cournand / Werner Forssmann / Dickinson W. Richards 1957: Daniel Bovet 1958: George Beadle / Edward Tatum / Joshua Lederberg 1959: Severo Ochoa / Arthur Kornberg 1960: Frank Burnet / Peter Medawar 1961: Georg von Békésy 1962: Francis Crick / James Watson / Maurice Wilkins 1963: John Eccles / Alan Hodgkin / Andrew Huxley 1964: Konrad Bloch / Feodor Lynen 1965: François Jacob / André Lwoff / Jacques Monod 1966: Francis Rous / Charles B. Huggins 1967: Ragnar Granit / Haldan Hartline / George Wald 1968: Robert W. Holley / Har Khorana / Marshall Nirenberg 1969: Max Delbrück / Alfred Hershey / Salvador Luria 1970: Bernard Katz / Ulf von Euler / Julius Axelrod 1971: Earl Sutherland Jr. 1972: Gerald Edelman / Rodney Porter 1973: Karl von Frisch / Konrad Lorenz / Nikolaas Tinbergen 1974: Albert Claude / Christian de Duve / George Palade 1975: David Baltimore / Renato Dulbecco / Howard Temin
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2001–present	2001: Leland H. Hartwell / Tim Hunt / Paul Nurse 2002: Sydney Brenner / H. Robert Horvitz / John E. Sulston 2003: Paul Lauterbur / Peter Mansfield 2004: Richard Axel / Linda B. Buck 2005: Barry Marshall / Robin Warren 2006: Andrew Fire / Craig Mello 2007: Mario Capecchi / Martin Evans / Oliver Smithies 2008: Harald zur Hausen / Luc Montagnier / Françoise Barré-Sinoussi 2009: Elizabeth Blackburn / Carol W. Greider / Jack W. Szostak 2010: Robert G. Edwards 2011: Bruce Beutler / Jules A. Hoffmann / Ralph M. Steinman (posthumously) 2012: John Gurdon / Shinya Yamanaka 2013: James Rothman / Randy Schekman / Thomas C. Südhof 2014: John O'Keefe / May-Britt Moser / Edvard Moser 2015: William C. Campbell / Satoshi Ōmura / Tu Youyou 2016: Yoshinori Ohsumi 2017: Jeffrey C. Hall / Michael Rosbash / Michael W. Young 2018: James P. Allison / Tasuku Honjo 2019: Gregg L. Semenza / Peter J. Ratcliffe / William Kaelin Jr. 2020: Harvey J. Alter / Michael Houghton / Charles M. Rice 2021: David Julius / Ardem Patapoutian 2022: Svante Pääbo 2023: Katalin Karikó / Drew Weissman 2024: Victor Ambros / Gary Ruvkun

v t e 1945 Nobel Prize laureates
Chemistry	Artturi Ilmari Virtanen (Finland)
Literature (1945)	Gabriela Mistral (Chile)
Peace	Cordell Hull (United States)
Physics	Wolfgang Pauli (Austria)
Physiology or Medicine	Alexander Fleming (Great Britain) Ernst Boris Chain (Great Britain) Howard Florey (Australia)
Nobel Prize recipients 1940 1941 1942 1943 1944 1945 1946 1947 1948 1949 1950

Fellows of the Royal Society elected in 1943

Fellows

Foreign

v t e History of infectious diseases
Individual diseases	Cholera HIV/AIDS Leprosy Malaria Plague Polio Smallpox Syphilis Tuberculosis Typhoid fever Yellow fever
People	Alexander Fleming Maurice Hilleman Edward Jenner Robert Koch Louis Pasteur Jonas Salk Ignaz Semmelweis John Snow Israel Jacob Kligler
Major epidemics	Black Death (1346–1353) Spanish flu (1918–1920) HIV/AIDS pandemic (1981–present) COVID-19 pandemic (2019–present*)
Other	Discovery of disease-causing pathogens Smallpox eradication Social history of viruses

v t e Time 100: The Most Important People of the 20th Century
Leaders & revolutionaries	David Ben-Gurion Winston Churchill Mahatma Gandhi Mikhail Gorbachev Adolf Hitler Ho Chi Minh Pope John Paul II Ruhollah Khomeini Martin Luther King Jr. Vladimir Lenin Nelson Mandela Mao Zedong Ronald Reagan Eleanor Roosevelt Franklin D. Roosevelt Theodore Roosevelt Margaret Sanger Margaret Thatcher Unknown Tiananmen Square rebel Lech Wałęsa
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Builders & titans	Stephen Bechtel Sr. Leo Burnett Willis Carrier Walt Disney Henry Ford Bill Gates Amadeo Giannini Ray Kroc Estée Lauder William Levitt Lucky Luciano Louis B. Mayer Charles E. Merrill Akio Morita Walter Reuther Pete Rozelle David Sarnoff Juan Trippe Sam Walton Thomas J. Watson Jr.
Scientists & thinkers	Leo Baekeland Tim Berners-Lee Rachel Carson Albert Einstein Philo Farnsworth Enrico Fermi Alexander Fleming Sigmund Freud Robert H. Goddard Kurt Gödel Edwin Hubble John Maynard Keynes Leakey family Jean Piaget Jonas Salk William Shockley Alan Turing Francis Crick & James Watson Ludwig Wittgenstein Wright brothers
Heroes & icons	Muhammad Ali The American G.I. Lady Diana Spencer Anne Frank Billy Graham Che Guevara Edmund Hillary & Tenzing Norgay Helen Keller Kennedy family Bruce Lee Charles Lindbergh Harvey Milk Marilyn Monroe Emmeline Pankhurst Rosa Parks Pelé Jackie Robinson Andrei Sakharov Mother Teresa Bill W.

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