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Great Minds of the Past Century

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     When World War I broke out, the staff of the bacteriology lab in Saint Mary's University, where Alexander Fleming worked, went to France to set up a battlefield hospital lab. Here they encountered infections so drastic that soldiers quickly died from them. Yet they were still simple infections. Fleming felt there must be something, a chemical like salvarsan, that could help fight microbe infection even in wounds caused by exploding shells. During the course of the war, Fleming made many innovations in treatment of the wounded, but this was soon overshadowed by the work he did afterwards.

A colony of Penicillium notatum.

     Back in Saint Mary's lab in the 1920s, Fleming searched for an effective antiseptic. He discovered lysozyme, an enzyme occurring in many body fluids, such as tears. It had a natural antibacterial effect, but not against the strongest infectious agents. He kept looking. Fleming had so much going on in his lab that it was often in a jumble. This disorder proved very fortunate. In 1928 he was straightening up a pile of Petri dishes where he had been growing bacteria, but which had been piled in the sink. He opened each one and examined it before tossing it into the cleaning solution. One made him stop and say, "That's funny." Some mold was growing on one of the dishes -- not too unusual -- but all around the mold, the staph bacteria had been killed -- very unusual. He took a sample of the mold. He found that it was from the penicillium family, later specified as penicillium notatum. Fleming presented his findings in 1929, but raised little interest. He published a report on penicillin and its potential uses in the British Journal of Experimental Pathology. Fleming worked with the mold for some time, but refining and growing it was a difficult process better suited to chemists. The work was taken over by a team of chemists and mold specialists, but was cut short when several of them died or relocated. It took World War II to revitalize interest in penicillin, and Howard Florey and Ernst Chain picked up the work.

     In recognition for his contribution, Alexander Fleming was knighted in 1944. With Chain and Florey he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1945.

Alexander Fleming
Bacteriologist

BORN Aug. 6, 1881, in Ayrshire, Scotland

1955 Dies of a heart attack March 11 in London