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Alexander Fleming: Life and Legacy

Alexander Fleming was a Scottish physician and microbiologist best known for discovering penicillin. He was born in 1881 in Scotland and studied medicine, becoming a lecturer in bacteriology at St Mary's Hospital in London. During World War I, he served as a military surgeon. In 1928, he was elected Professor of Bacteriology at the University of London. Fleming is most famous for his 1928 discovery of penicillin, when he noticed mold inhibiting the growth of bacteria in one of his culture plates. This led to the development of penicillin as the first antibiotic drug. Fleming shared the 1945 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for this discovery. He died in 1955 of a heart attack.

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120 views5 pages

Alexander Fleming: Life and Legacy

Alexander Fleming was a Scottish physician and microbiologist best known for discovering penicillin. He was born in 1881 in Scotland and studied medicine, becoming a lecturer in bacteriology at St Mary's Hospital in London. During World War I, he served as a military surgeon. In 1928, he was elected Professor of Bacteriology at the University of London. Fleming is most famous for his 1928 discovery of penicillin, when he noticed mold inhibiting the growth of bacteria in one of his culture plates. This led to the development of penicillin as the first antibiotic drug. Fleming shared the 1945 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for this discovery. He died in 1955 of a heart attack.

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Alexander Fleming

By Sanjay Pillai
Who is Alexander Fleming
Alexander Fleming FRS FRSE FRCS[1] (6 August 1881 – 11 March 1955)
was a Scottish physician and microbiologist, best known fo For this
discovery, he shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1945
with Howard Florey and Ernst Boris Chain
Early life and education
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 (1816–1888) and 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 to Grace, and died when Alexander was seven.

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. 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; 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 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, 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]
How Fleming discovered penicillin
An uncovered Petri dish near an open window became contaminated
with mold. Fleming realized that the bacteria near the mold were
dying. He isolated the mold and identified it as Penicillium genus, which
he found to be effective against all Gram-positive pathogens.
Death of Alexander Fleming
• On 11 March 1955, Fleming died at his home in London of a heart
attack. His ashes are buried in St Paul's Cathedral.

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