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Alexander Fleming

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Alexander Fleming
File:Alexander Fleming.jpg
Born(1881-08-06)6 August 1881
Lochfield, Scotland
Died11 March 1955(1955-03-11) (aged 73)
London, England
NationalityScottish
Known forDiscovery of penicillin
AwardsNobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (1945)
Scientific career
FieldsBacteriology, immunology
InstitutionsSt Mary's Hospital, London

Sir Alexander Fleming (6 August 1881 – 11 March 1955) was a Scottish biologist and pharmacologist. Fleming published many articles on bacteriology, immunology, and chemotherapy. His best-known achievements are the discovery of the enzyme lysozyme in 1922 and the discovery of the antibiotic substance penicillin from the fungus Penicillium notatum in 1928, for which he shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1945 with Florey and Chain.

Biography

Early life

Faroe Islands stamp commemorating Fleming
St.Mary's Hospital, Paddington, London.

Fleming was born on 6 August 1881 at Lochfield farm near Darvel in East Ayrshire, Scotland. He was the third of the four children of Hugh Fleming (1816 – 1888) from his second marriage to Grace Stirling Morton (1848 – 1928), 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, and died when Alexander (known as Alex) was seven.

Fleming went to Loudoun Moor School and Darvel School, and then for two years to Kilmarnock Academy. After working in a shipping office for four years, the twenty-year-old Fleming inherited some money from an uncle, John Fleming. His older brother, Tom, was already a physician and suggested to his younger sibling that he follow the same career, and so in 1901, the younger Alexander enrolled at St Mary's Hospital, Paddington, London. He qualified for the school with distinction in 1906 and had the option of becoming a surgeon.

By chance, however, he had been a member of the rifle club (he had been an active member of the Territorial Army since 1900). 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. He gained M.B. and then B.Sc. with Gold Medal in 1908, and became a lecturer at St. Mary's until 1914. On 23 December 1915, Fleming married a trained nurse, Sarah Marion McElroy of Killala, Ireland.

Fleming served throughout World War I as a captain in the 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, which was a teaching hospital. He was elected Professor of Bacteriology in 1928.

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Personal life

The popular story of Winston Churchill's father's paying for Fleming's education after Fleming's father saved young Winston from death is false. According to the biography, Penicillin Man: Alexander Fleming and the Antibiotic Revolution by Kevin Brown, Alexander Fleming, in a letter to his friend and colleague Andre Gratia, 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. 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."

Fleming's first wife, Sarah, died in 1949. Their only child, Robert, became a general medical practitioner. After Sarah's death, Fleming married Dr. Amalia Koutsouri-Vourekas, a Greek colleague at St. Mary's, on 9 April 1953; she died in 1986.

Death and legacy

In 1955, Fleming died suddenly at his home in London of a heart attack. He was cremated and his ashes interred in St Paul's Cathedral a week later. Alexander Fleming was Catholic.

Honours and awards

His discovery of penicillin had changed the world of modern medicine by introducing the age of useful antibiotics; penicillin has saved, and is still saving, millions of people.

The laboratory at St Mary's Hospital, London where Fleming discovered penicillin is home to the Fleming Museum. There is also a school in the Lomita area named Alexander Fleming Middle School

  • 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 will be on display when the Royal Museum re-opens in 2011.
  • Fleming was awarded the Hunterian Professorship by the Royal College of Surgeons of England
  • Fleming was knighted in 1944.
  • Florey received the greater honour of a peerage for his monumental work in making penicillin available to the public and saving millions of lives in World War II, becoming a Baron.
  • The discovery of penicillin was ranked as the most important discovery of the millennium when the year 2000 was approaching by at least 3 large Swedish magazines. It is impossible to know how many lives have been saved by this discovery, but some of these magazines placed their estimate near 200 million lives.

Bibliography

  • The Life Of Sir Alexander Fleming, Jonathan Cape, 1959. Maurois, André.
  • Nobel Lectures, 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

References

  1. Karl Grandin, ed. (1945). "Alexander Fleming Biography". Les Prix Nobel. The Nobel Foundation. Retrieved 2008-07-24. {{cite web}}: |author= has generic name (help)
  2. eg, Philadelphia Enquirer, 17 July 1945: Brown, Penicillin Man, note 43 to Chapter 2
  3. 14 November 1945; British Library Additional Manuscripts 56115: Brown, Penicillin Man, note 44 to Chapter 2
  4. see Misplaced Pages Discovery of penicillin article entry for 1920
  5. A History of May & Baker 1834-1984, Alden Press 1984.
  6. "Greatest Hero of the Millennium". Ny Teknik. 1999-12-16.

External links

Academic offices
Preceded byAlastair Sim Rector of the University of Edinburgh
1951 – 1954 		Succeeded bySydney Smith
Laureates of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
1901–1925
1926–1950
1951–1975
1976–2000
2001–present
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