Alexander Fleming

Alexander Fleming, The Father of Penicillin

On August 6, 1881, Alexander Fleming was born, a scientist who dedicated his life to research and who, as a result of an oversight, made one of the most important discoveries of medicine: penicillin. This antibiotic that has saved millions of lives also earned him the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1945.

Joseph Gavaldá

The discovery of penicillin in 1928 by Scotsman Alexander Fleming is the most important case of serendipity or accidental discovery in history. It all happened when the Scottish scientist went on holiday and forgot a bacterial culture plate where by chance a fungus grew. On his return eureka! he stumbled upon the scientific finding of the century without which Fleming, despite being a brilliant researcher, would have been nothing more than a footnote in the history of medical microbiology.

Alexander Fleming was born on August 6, 1881, near Darvelen Ayrshire, Scotland. He was the third of four children born of his father's second marriage. After studying at several Scottish institutes, the young Alexander moved to London at the age of thirteen, where he lived with his brother Thomas, who was studying medicine. After completing his education at Regent Street Polytechnic Institute, he worked for four years in a shipping company until, in 1901, at the age of 20, he inherited a small sum of money from his uncle John Fleming. It was Thomas, who by then was already a doctor, who convinced his brother to enter St. Mary's Hospital Medical School in Paddington, London, to pursue the same career as him. In 1906, Alexander graduated in medicine and surgery.

FIRST DISCOVERIES

In 1922, Fleming discovered lysozyme, a bactericidal enzyme that prevents infections and is present in numerous substances secreted by living beings, such as tears, saliva, or nasal secretions and that acts as a barrier against infections. The finding was very important because it demonstrated the possibility that there were substances that, being harmless to the cells of the body, were lethal to bacteria.

Of his famous discovery, Fleming once said, "Sometimes you find what you're not looking for. When I woke up just after dawn on September 28, 1928, I certainly didn't plan to revolutionize all drugs when I discovered the world's first antibiotic or the killer of bacteria. But I guess that's exactly what I did."

THE WONDERFUL PENICILLIN

Thus, when he returned from a vacation in 1928, Fleming studied the mutations in staphylococci cultures that he had left stacked in a corner of his laboratory. He noted that they had been accidentally contaminated by a fungus. The staphylococci colonies surrounding the fungus had been destroyed, while other staphylococci colonies further away were intact. Fleming grew the mold in a pure culture and discovered that it produced a substance that killed several disease-causing bacteria. He identified mold as belonging to the genus Penicillium and, after a few months of calling it "mold juice", on March 7, 1929 he named the substance penicillin.

Fleming conducted several experiments aimed at establishing the degree of susceptibility, sensitivity, or resistance of a bacterium to the breeding ground of a wide range of pathogenic bacteria and observed that many of them were quickly destroyed. Eight months after his first observations, Fleming published the results in a memoir that is still considered a classic in the field today, but to which not much attention was paid at the time. Although Fleming understood from the outset the importance of the phenomenon of antibiosis (a biological interaction that consists of the impossibility of some organisms living in the vicinity of others, because some secrete a substance, called antibiotic, that causes the death of others) that he had discovered, penicillin still took fifteen years to become a drug of universal use. In 1944, Alexander Fleming was appointed sir and in 1945 he received the Nobel Prize in Medicine, which he shared with Howard Florey and Ernst Boris Chain, who also carried out their work in this field.

After a lifetime devoted to research, Alexander Fleming, the father of penicillin, died on March 11 1955 at the age of 74 at his home in London after suffering a heart attack. His body was buried as a national hero in the crypt of St. Paul's Cathedral, in the same city where he developed his career and which saw him die.