Alexander Fleming: Biography And Contributions Of This British Doctor
Of all the discoveries in medicine that the 20th century gave us, penicillin is probably the most practical and the most important. Also the most anecdotal because it was discovered by pure chance, thanks to an accident resulting from a mistake by a doctor and microbiologist named Alexander Fleming.
Fleming and his penicillin are considered by many to be the most important discovery by serendipity in history, and rightly so because thanks to him we have one of the most efficient and recurring antibiotics for human use.
Next We are going to learn about the life of this researcher through a biography of Alexander Fleming in which we will see how he discovered that the broth of a mushroom fought certain bacteria and the importance that this meant for his time, especially with the arrival of World War II.
Sir Alexander Fleming was a Scottish physician and microbiologist known worldwide for his discovery of the properties of penicillin, substance released by a common fungus. This advance was crucial for the history of medicine of the last century since, despite having multiple discoveries made throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, there were still many pathogenic diseases that resisted the therapeutic methods of the time.
Among the great advances obtained by medicine and biology in the 19th century we have the establishment of the microbial origin of infectious diseases, thanks to the figures of scientists such as Robert Koch and Louis Pasteur. However, despite the efforts put into the development of vaccines, many infectious diseases continued to have fatal effects in most cases, and there was a lack of means to combat them once they were contracted.
This is why penicillin turned out to be so important, because It was capable of destroying pathogenic germs without harming the body, a biological antiseptic that is respectful of the human body. The substance discovered by Fleming not only served to save millions of lives, but would also revolutionize therapeutic methods, beginning the era of antibiotics and, consequently, the establishment of modern medicine.
Early years
Alexander Fleming was born on 6 August 1881 near Darvel, East Ayrshire, Scotland, within a peasant family dedicated to agriculture and animal husbandry. He was the third of four children from his father Hugh Fleming’s second marriage to his mother Grace Stirling Morton. His father died when Alexander was only seven years old, leaving his widowed mother to take care of the family farm with the help of one of her stepchildren.
When he turned thirteen, Alexander Fleming went to live in London with his half-brother Thomas, who worked as a doctor there. Fleming completed his education with two courses at the Polytechnic Institute in Regent Street, later working in the offices of a shipping company.
Medical studies and military service
In the year 1900 Fleming He enlisted in the London Scottish Regiment to participate in the Second Boer War (1899-1902), but the conflict ended before his unit could embark and he did not participate in the battle.
However, his taste for military life led him to remain in that regiment, intervening in the First World War as an officer of the Royal Army Medical Corps in France. He was also part of the School of Medicine’s rifle unit.
In 1901, at the age of twenty, He inherited a small legacy from his uncle John Fleming that helped him study medicine He was subsequently awarded a scholarship to St. Mary’s Hospital Medical School in Paddington, an institution with which he would end up having a lifelong relationship. In 1906 he graduated in medicine and surgery, and joined the team of bacteriologist Sir Almroth Wright, a pioneer in vaccines and immunology, with whom he became associated for forty years.
Fleming was an extraordinary student, and proof of this is that he received the gold medal from the University of London in 1908 A few years later, in 1914, he began teaching at St. Mary’s in London and, a year later, he married Sarah Marion McElroy, an Irish nurse with whom he had his eldest son Robert Fleming.
Appointed professor of bacteriology, in 1928 he would become a full professor and retire as professor emeritus in 1948, although he became director of the Wright-Fleming Institute of Microbiology until 1954, an institution founded in his honor and that of his former teacher and research partner.
First antibacterial findings
Fleming He dedicated his professional life to researching the human body’s defenses against bacterial infections, a task that caused his name to end up being associated with two great discoveries in that area: lysozyme and penicillin. Although lysozyme is notable, it is his discovery of penicillin that has made Alexander Fleming’s name go down in history as it is the most important from a practical point of view.
Fleming discovered lysozyme in 1922 when he observed that nasal secretion, tears and saliva had the ability to dissolve certain types of bacteria, acting as a barrier against infections. He later proved that this ability depended on an active enzyme, lysozyme, found in many body tissues. His discovery revealed something revolutionary for its time because it showed that there were substances that, on the one hand, were harmless to the body’s cells but, on the other, were lethal to pathogenic bacteria.
Penicillin: the accident that saved millions of lives
The discovery of penicillin, one of the most important medical discoveries of the 20th century, occurred serendipically, accidentally On September 28, 1928, Alezander Fleming, who was returning from vacation, would make an astonishing discovery thanks, in part, to having gotten lost and not having the laboratory very well organized.
At that time he was doing a study on the mutations of certain colonies of staphylococci and saw that one of his cultures had been accidentally contaminated by a microorganism coming from the outside air, a fungus that he would later identify as Penicilliumnotatum.
This would have remained a mere anecdote resulting from a certain disorganization if it were not for the fact that Fleming, full of curiosity and amazement, perceived the behavior of the crop as strange. He saw that the area where the contamination had occurred, the staphylococci had become transparent something that Fleming interpreted as the effect that the fungus had an antibacterial substance and that this had weakened the bacterial culture.
About this amazing discovery, Alexander Fleming himself would say the following:
“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 medicine by discovering the world’s first antibiotic, or bacteria killer. But I guess That’s exactly what I did.”
As he experimented with it, Fleming knew how to take advantage of it despite the limited resources of his laboratory at that time He was able to observe that a pure culture broth of the fungus acquired, in a matter of a few days, a high level of antibacterial activity. He carried out several experiments focused on seeing the degree of susceptibility to the broth of various types of pathogenic bacteria, observing that many of these pathogens were quickly destroyed by the action of penicillin.
Later, he injected the culture into rabbits and mice, verifying that it was harmless to leukocytes, which led him to the conclusion that this substance had a reliable index that it was harmless to animal cells. Fleming observed that this substance, even diluted, had an antibacterial power much greater than that of powerful antiseptics such as carbolic acid.
About eight months after his first observations, Fleming published the results in a memoir that is now considered a classic in bacteriology, although it did not arouse much interest at the time. Although Fleming understood from the beginning the importance of the antibacterial power of penicillin, this It still took about fifteen years to become the universally used therapeutic agent that would end up being
Last years and death
One of the reasons why penicillin was not immediately popular has to do with the fact that its purification process was excessively difficult for the chemical techniques of the time. Fortunately, this was solved thanks to the research carried out in Oxford by the team of Australian pathologist Howard Florey and German chemist Ernst B. Chain, who in 1939 obtained a grant for the study of antimicrobial substances secreted by microorganisms.
In 1941, the first satisfactory results were obtained with human patients During the Second World War, resources were invested in this type of research, which meant that by 1944, all the seriously wounded in the famous and crucial battle of Normandy could be treated with penicillin.
Thanks to this, Alexander Fleming managed to achieve the fame he so richly deserved, albeit with some delay. In 1942 he had already been elected a member of the Royal Society, and would receive the title of sir two years later. In 1945 he shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine with Florey and Chain In 1946 he received the Gold Medal of Honor from the Royal College of Surgeons and in 1948 he was awarded the Grand Cross of the Order of Alfonso X, the Wise.
In 1949 his wife Sarah died, and Alexander Fleming would marry again in 1953, this time to a Greek doctor named Amalia Koutsouri-Vourekas. In 1951 he was appointed chancellor of the University of Edinburgh.
After a lifetime dedicated to research and being the discoverer of the most important medical advance of the 20th century, Alexander Fleming died on March 11, 1955 at his home in London, due to a heart attack at the age of 74. Given the great discovery he made and being indirectly responsible for millions of lives being saved, his body was buried as a national hero in the crypt of St. Paul’s Cathedral.
